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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

> There is huge, unmet demand in the world for a phone that does nothing but make calls.

The Nokia 1100 [...] is a very simple GSM mobile phone produced by Nokia [...] the world's best selling phone handset as well as the best selling consumer electronics device in the world. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100)

IMO the author has a point about the smartphones, but completely misses the mark here.

It's very possible that low-end smartphones will take over the dumphone market soon and/or that cheap Chinese phones will overrun it, but what the author proposes doesn't address that either.

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It's very possible that low-end smartphones will take over the dumphone market soon

Unlikely. There's a few elephants in the room here, the biggest being battery time. You'd be surprised how many people would give you a blank stare if you told them their next phone needs to re-charged almost every night, in exchange for being able to play angry birds...

Also take a close look at the issues of your (presumably) high-end smartphone. Now, when was the last time you tried to use a low-end smartphone?

There's a few elephants in the room here, the biggest being battery time. You'd be surprised how many people would give you a blank stare if you told them their next phone needs to re-charged almost every night

There's no fundamental reason Android devices won't emerge that have awesome (or at least, way better) battery life. We haven't seen demand for that in western markets simply because the high end phone space is dominated by flashy hardware and high end features. Android is very flexible and scales down to surprisingly low end device specs.

Well, there's only so many trade-offs you can make on a cheap phone. A touchscreen is not only a big cost-factor and battery-drainer but also impairs usability of the core feature (making calls) significantly.

You can't read it in bright sunlight, you can't make calls "blind" because there's no keypad/tactile feedback, and even my high-end android has nasty input-lags - whereas all my old dumbphones respond instantly to any keypress.

Sure, you could cut out the touchscreen and still run android but that's hardly a smartphone then...

If Nokia would concentrate on good low end phone, maybe they could make a phone with a good sound quality. It's very hard to hear anything from modern phones when you actually try to talk to someone. And no one is even trying to fix that.

And add to that the cost of paying a provider for 3G Internet connection every month, and the allure of a phone that lasts for a week and can make calls and send texts shines through.

> You'd be surprised how many people would give you a blank stare if you told them their next phone needs to re-charged almost every night, in exchange for being able to play angry birds...

Reminds me of portable (laptop) computers.

Weak processors. Awful graphics performance. Heavy. Awful battery life. You'd be nuts to make one of these your sole computer.

Until those problems mostly went away. Today, most computers sold are laptops.

I think it's unwise to assume that the drawbacks of current smartphones are permanent.

Note the last word of the sentence that I replied to.

Eventually we'll be moving around in flying cars. But not in the next few years.

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