The $12 Gongkai Phone
bunniestudios.com
bunniestudios.com
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.
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.
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.
The thing is the interfaces between CPU, RAM and flash tend to use a lot of pins - especially if you want them fast and with support for lots of memory. Look at the number of contacts you get on a stick of RAM in a PC.
Lots of pins is acceptable in a product like this which is BGA surface mounted - but for things like Arduino where the pins are 0.1" apart for easy manual working, having the memory and flash on-chip is much more practical :)
Of course you can package silicon in different packages, and package them, and assemble them on a pcb.
And no, that's not a Blade Runner screencap. That's Beijing.
Photos: Beijing Blanketed in Smog: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/photos-beijing-blankete...
Smog dents Beijing’s expat appeal: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b29afeae-9dc9-11e2-bea1-00144...
Same difference, as the kids used to say. The "gonkai" described in the article is essentially the proto-Blade Runner universe, so life is imitating fiction. It is fascinating that the filmmakers were so prescient.
In the Philippines apparently most folks text. Signal is occasional; text messages eventually get through automatically as you travel around during the day while a call is only possible at those brief times of connectivity.
Anyway, can this $12 phone text?
Doubt they have the liecence, but it's a very fast way of typing. With an old Nokia 8250 - I can type pretty fast with the phone in my pocket - muscle memory for the win!
[0]http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...
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.
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.
There was a photo-article submitted to HN a few days ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697968) (http://m.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/chinese-diy-inventi...)
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).
That said, a lot of manufacturing firms there compete on price. Three big factors in manufacturing quality are - how good is your factory equipment, how much human (error) is involved, and how much of your product are you willing to throw away.
In the 1980s/90s, not only manufacturing jobs, but also equipment headed east. Those same 30 year old production lines are still in use at the lower levels of Chinese manufacturing, being used for processes they really were not designed for.
Because of the low cost of labour there is a lower force towards automation. I've seen cell phone production lines that are pretty much by hand in CN, and simple boards assembled by huge machines without human interaction in the west. Hell, I've seen items being hand painted that could have been spray painted because spray paint was too expensive. Humans make mistakes.
The biggest factor though is yield. On TFT screens, something like 80% were thrown away at one stage. Throwing away only the worst 10% greatly reduces your price, but also means you are shipping much more variable stuff.
Basically, if you want cheap stuff, you get bad stuff. It's not that China can't make high quality goods, it's that people want cheap goods.
Maybe you mean "style"?
Even so, they are taking over the world.
In between there's a large mid range where quality is rapidly improving but the prices stay low.
I got a Star B92M phone, for example. It's a cheap Galaxy S3 clone (same exact dimensions; comes with the same dandelion screensaver; some distributors offers it with a fake Samsung logo....). It's slower. It feels cheaper (the plastic back, for example is a noticeable weakness, and the GPS is a known problem - needs longer antennae). But it's got 1GB RAM, can take 64GB sd card, same 1280x720 resolution, higher resolution (12MP) main camera, dual sims, and generally acts and feels like a relatively high end phone with some minor caveats (try to run 3d stuff, and it's about the same performance as the much older HTC Desire HD, for example, though the Desire HD was much higher end when it was released and the Star trounces it overall performance). I'll stick to that cost range phone because it pays for itself vis-a-vis contract costs for a top end phone in ~6-8 months, and I'm good at breaking stuff...
Now the bar has been raised substantially higher, and there are 1800+ listings for phones with 1920x1080 resolution (in the 5" size range; lots of duplicates of the same models from multiple sellers, though), many of them quad core MTK based phones with 2GB RAM that are now at the very least up around the top of the mid-range segment if not outright challenging the most powerful high end phones yet.
In terms of innovation, you'll start seeing more of it once more of their manufacturers are pushing up against the ceiling set by the current pack leaders like Samsung and Apple. For now they are still busy playing catch-up in most respects.
To some extent we are also seeing different priorities that hides some of the features that these manufacturers put effort into. E.g. dual-sims seems to be pretty much a requirement for mid-range phones and above from the Chinese manufacturers, while you see it relatively rarely in models that are features heavily in the West. You even see 3 and 4 sim phones. A lot of these features may simply not make it to the West to any great extent because they're not what consumers here care about (but I'm in love with having dual sims - being able to slot in a second sim with cheap data etc. when travelling abroad while still being able to take calls on my standard number is great).
Stock android phones don't work. Stock android things that just work aren't phones. Phones that just work are not Android
{Okay, that last one is probably not totally true. =) }
The point was that making a phone from AOSP with no customization just doesn't work well.
Other than that, the GPS is pretty much useless but not for lack of trying - there's extra stuff there to facilitate AGPS etc. it seems, but the antenna is simply physically too short (there's lots of breakdowns on how to attach a longer antenna to fix it, but I've not bothered so far - I don't use GPS much).
Lots of companies are importing many of these devices. Amazon is full of them. They're also full of offers from distributors and manufacturers in China that offers a quite decent service. I'm in the UK, ordered mine via Amazon mostly for increased peace of mind vs. ordering direct, and had the phone in ca 10 days.
I've also ordered several cheap no-name Chinese tablets via UK distributors.
You'll probably see more and more of these appearing, especially as all of these manufacturers offers to put your own brand name on the devices often even in very small volumes (if you want a Samsung logotype or other known brand, you can probably get it at no extra cost from most of them when ordering even single units...)
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!
The networks speculate in a certain amount of the sims getting into active use and more than covering the few users that buy them to swap sims.
http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-C139-Prepaid-Phone-Tracfone/d...
"Don't just read about the phone itself. Read to/at the end, where Bunnie describes the environment where this phone and things like it are coming to be"
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.
Several of the boards of the devices I've had are exactly the same layout across multiple brands and with easily identifiable connection points for additional connectors etc.
The main limiting factor for doing this is that the touch panel is often the first to go (scratches, getting chipped or smashed totally - I've ruined 3 touch panels so far...), and many of the devices are so cheap they're not worth the hassle to repair vs. upgrading to a newer, better model cheaply.
E.g. my five month old Chinese phone has 1280x720 screen resolution. Similarly priced phones now tend to be a bit larger (5" vs. 4.7") and come with 1920x1080 screens. I cracked my touch panel recently (by sending the phone flying halfway across the room so I really can't fault the phone - other than a few cracks it's still working fine) and opted to order a new one for ca $40 this time, but had the screen gone too I probably would've shelled out a bit extra and just replaced the phone instead.
Nokia 105 will cost 15 euros. That's three pints of beer in a pub over here.