The big thing is not this phone, it's the chip.<p>The chip(MT6250) is a processor for feature phones which includes 260 mhz arm7 cpu,8Mbyte
of ram , dsp,bluetooth,2.5G and All kinds of IO. It can run games on a touchscreen phone.<p>And it costs $2 in large volumes. This is much less than many microcontrollers who offer much less capability. And with such performance and memory , it can support much better languages and tools, faster time to market, and more complex systems, for cheap.<p>Also , this chip uses 2 different silicon pieces(one for processor and one for ram), for very low cost, instead of what we do today: build different stuff on the same silicon piece and compromise performance and cost and development time along the way. This could open the way to a lot of innovation.
Of course with that fantastic price you get: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qBes7dk.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/qBes7dk.jpg</a><p>And no, that's not a Blade Runner screencap. That's Beijing.
It can be done cheaper, too, and will be, since there is a large user population in Africa/India/etc whose only problem with a $12 phone is that it costs $12 too much. Eventually they'll be cheap enough to put in cereal boxes. (That won't happen, because brightly colored bits of plastic have higher perceived value than crippled phones among people who buy cereal, but they'll still be lifechanging devices in much of the world.)
In many ways the Shanzai / Gongkai way has is a pre-cursor to the world we'll get as more patent intensive countries get past their expiration dates of those patents. And while I'm not convinced there will be a singularity, I am certain that we'll reach a point where enough stuff will be 'free to use' that the number of choices will grow large and the prices will be as commoditized as possible. An important thing to plan for is a recyclable version of the phone such that you can dispose of it safely and the materials can be recovered. Without that we'll just burn through a variety of rare earth elements by mining them, buying/using them, and then returning them to the earth somewhere else :-).
It is amazing that we can produce phones and sell them, profitably, at around $10.<p>Chinese manufacturers can do cheap. Now they just need to do "quality" (which will raise prices a bit) and "innovative". Once they get that cracked they'll take over the world.<p>From my ignorant uninformed perspective there are some weird cultural things going on. Why does China shovel out very very cheap goods? There are a small number of Chinese companies making quality products for the west, but not many.<p>There was a photo-article submitted to HN a few days ago. (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697968" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697968</a>) (<a href="http://m.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/chinese-diy-inventions/100511/" rel="nofollow">http://m.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/chinese-diy-inventi...</a>)<p>It's surprising the number of people making potentially dangerous things by themself out of bits and pieces in their backyard. And seemingly re-inventing a bunch of stuff while they do it. Many of these are the kind of things that would be done by universities (if they didn't care about health and safety).
Sure it's cheap, but not <i>that</i> cheap. Here in Sweden I can walk into a reputable electronics retailer and walk out with a brand new completely unlocked Samsung or Nokia phone, no contract, for $23-27, and that's including $25 sales tax.
Just a note on the comparison with the arduino: the main selling point of the arduino isn't the features/price ratio, but rather that it's open source hardware. I'm not very deeply involved with the matter, but I think that if you want just "any" programmable micro controller, you can get far more bang for the buck.
I have a spare mobile that I bought from a popular British retailer, Carphone Warehouse, for 99p. That was a special offer, but it's still on sale for £4.99. There's no contract attached to it, and you can swap out the SIM card for any one you wish.<p>It's a Samsung, doesn't do anything fancy, but it calls and texts without a problem, the battery lasts for weeks, and the signal is rock-solid. It's an ideal spare phone. I keep it in the car for emergencies, and take it out to charge it once a week or so. It's so simple that I actually prefer using it to a smartphone!
Amazon sell as Motorola unlocked for $7.99<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-C139-Prepaid-Phone-Tracfone/dp/B000F7VBUQ/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-C139-Prepaid-Phone-Tracfone/d...</a>
For anyone interested, it looks like this is the same phone <a href="http://dx.com/p/mini-i8-super-slim-gsm-card-phone-w-1-0-screen-quad-band-and-single-sim-light-green-138222" rel="nofollow">http://dx.com/p/mini-i8-super-slim-gsm-card-phone-w-1-0-scre...</a> . Although, for ~$30, one can get phones that are much more capable <a href="http://dx.com/c/cell-phone-599/cell-phones-511/feature-phones-531?sort=price&sortType=asc" rel="nofollow">http://dx.com/c/cell-phone-599/cell-phones-511/feature-phone...</a>
A new system of IP growing organically is an interesting thing to watch. The western system is so old now that it suffers from a bit of "windows syndrome". The undocumented exploits are as important to it's hackers (trollish actors?) and users as its intended features.<p>A brand new one growing organically in the digital age could be a fearsome beast if it moves beyond the "knockoff factory for western goods" phase.
I wish there were a phone design which let you re-use the screen/etc. but swap out all the baseband with a new module; i.e. equivalent to a "burner" for security, but with the functionality of a smartphone, or at least a nicely built regular phone.
Beware, the first link seems to have been 'click jacked'. It opened a new tab with domain "fxxksheep".replace('xx', 'uc') which my company proxy classified as porn.