The $12 “Gongkai” Phone (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The $12 “Gongkai” Phone (2013)

bunniestudios.com

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There is a link in the comments to a 7 dollar phone that looks way more polished. Crazy really, a fast food meal will cost you more than that here in Canada.

http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/$7_cell_phone

I own one of these burner phones for backup use, $9.99 but it was on sale for $4.99 when I bought it.

It's no iPhone, but I also get 8-10 days on a charge:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

Tracfones are subsidized though, they give them away for almost nothing because people buy minutes for them, and they're almost useless without minutes unless you just want it to call 911.

This phone too is unlocked?

The $12 one has mp3 playback and micro sd support though. Those are some pretty big features.

And Bluetooth. Really incredible for the price.

Mediatek (MTK) was for many years the SoC of choice for ultra-cheap feature phones like these, but they seem to have gone up the scale (their Android platforms are good value) while others like RDA have filled in the ultra-low-end.

I think one of the ways in which they were able to undercut MTK was to use a different CPU core - the $2 MT6250 in bunnie's phone still uses an ARM core, which means licensing fees to ARM are some part of the cost (I'm not aware of any "pirated" ARM cores) - and in such a cheap SoC, could be a significant fraction. The RDA8851 is "MIPS-compatible" so they aren't paying ARM and likely the other IP on it was either designed by RDA or others in China.

With such capabilities it's pretty weird that such companies aren't fiercely competing in the mcu market(at least in the high end of it). They could have made a killer mcu for very cheap.

Check out the soldering! http://wiki.hacdc.org/images/6/6d/Phone4.jpg

I don't know much about soldering. What's unusual about this instance?

It's hand soldered by someone inexperienced.

Ah, this dates from a year or two ago. Here's a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703946

It's been possible to get a reasonably good Android tablet for $30 in Shentzen for two years or so. Now those are down to $20 in quantity.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2014-shenzhen-Wintouch...

So, what are the rules of gongkai? That might have been useful to include in the article.

First and second are presumably "Don't talk about gongkai."

If any article needed a date in the title this one does. Seen it on HN a few times now.

(can HN have code that checks for dupe links from the past and forces the year in the title, if so, just as an additional signal to long term readers? That'd help a lot.)

Is reliably finding the date a trivial task to you? Date of submission could also be misleading.

Is this really that extraordinary? I can buy a Samsung GT-E1200 candybar phone for $15 in Norway. Presumably similarly priced phones are sold in the US. That's a considerably nicer phone too, with a bigger screen and more features.

Or Nokia 105 http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_105-5324.php , about the same price here in Russia. I guess what attracts others is the absolute record of a minimum commercial price of a phone, kind of "how low can you go?" achievement.

At $15, it's most likely subsidised (Tesco and ASDA carry them subsidised at exactly that pricepoint in the UK). Unlocked, it's twice that.

Still cheap, but 3X more expensive than the phone featured in the article. 3X is a lot.

No, I can buy the phone without any contract/subsidy for that price. Indeed, I don't think subsidised candybar-style phones are even sold here anymore. But even if it's $30 in the UK, are there really no (unlocked) phones available at a lower price-point?

Fair enough. It's plausible - I have a few of the Samsung (unlocked) at roughly that price point, but they were cheap enough that I didn't bother to shop around.

I used that exact phone (well, it had a different plastic shell was called "cardphone" - no bluetooth) for a year as my main cell phone.

It worked very well, had about 3 days of battery time (given my uses). The best part is that I never forgot it, given how small it was - always there with my credit cards

Unfortunately, the headphone died after a bad fall (I could still use on speakermode).

I'll be very happy to buy a new one, especially it has bluetooth now. (if there's someone from China I would be interested, it usually sells for 3 times as much on ebay :-)

I have been using a Motorola "FONE" (or F3, or "MOTO FONE") for the last 2 years. It does nothing but make calls. Well, I guess it has an alarm and it also has redial.

It also has an e-ink screen, which is mildly interesting.

It was designed and built for emerging markets that might not have reliable electricity, hence the e-ink and other battery saving measures.

I love it. Very small. The only problem is that it is 2G and I have some trouble in some places. I suspect that 2G service is not well maintained or observed these days ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

Where did you find one? That was my phone through college and one of my favorite pieces of design ever. the screen was phenomenal and the interaction fairly unique.

This reminds me of the magazine phone. http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/

How hard is it to re-program these? If you needed a device with GSM and just a few GPIO, this makes more sense than an Arduino + GSM shield. In fact, the entire phone is cheaper than a GSM shield. It would even make sense to use this phone solely fore GSM comms and connect to some other µc over the UART.

"Gongkai" seems to be between public domain and open source. Interesting to see a sharing ecosystem developing without a firm legal framework.

Actually its more a collective exploitation of third party IP. The factories that build the chips, the people that put together the boards, the places that build the screens etc. They have generally at one time or another been contracted to or licensed to produce some product, which they do, and then well they make more for their friends without so much cost.

In a fascinating sort of way it works like folks who burn copies of DVDs and sell them out of their trunk except these folks have access to much more sophisticated manufacturing gear. By and large its "harmless" in that none of the people buying a $12 phone are going to buy a $60 legitimate phone, even if that was the only phone available. So its hard to argue to economic loss as well.

Very little of the stuff built into these phones and gizmos though seems like the original creator was doing it to give away.

A good chunk of open source is reimplementated copies of closed source.

But not by people who just left the developer teams of those products and can take advantage of IP in a similar way (at least in the majority of cases)

I don't think it happens at the chip level.Chip fabs have pretty good respect for IP.

When I was at Intel we saw "breakage" at the packaging level, basically once die were packaged they would be run through a tester and a fraction of the parts would bin out (fail characterization testing). In theory those bad chips were ground up and recycled, sometimes they went missing. (this was back in the late 80's early 90's) At the time Intel invested in ways of tracking chips back through the process when those chips showed up in the market the source of the leak could be plugged.

It is entirely unclear to me if companies like AllWinner which make a bunch ARM chips has similar sorts of controls.

Under $12, with camera, bluetooth, FM, radio, flashlight and dual SIM

http://www.ebay.in/itm/Q-Tel-Cheapest-GSM-Dual-Sim-Mobile-Ph...

There are more available in B&M stores for $6-$7 with a reasonable lifespan (easily greater than 1-2 years)

It's pretty amazing to me that there are pretty regular sales of of crappy no-contract Android 4.X phones for under $10. Here's a current one:

http://www.target.com/p/brightspot-zte-zinger-prepaid-cell-p...

This is probably locked to Target or whoever they use.

Yeah it's clearly sold with the razor / razor blades (or printer / ink) pricing but I see a lot of people buy them as wifi-only devices.

I outfitted my house with 5 wifi cameras by buying some prepaid Android phones like that from Boost Mobile on clearance. Why pay $150 per Dropcam or some other dedicated camera when you can get one with an attached computer for a couple bucks?

What app / software do you use to manage the cameras?

How do you keep them powered, have you had to run extra power cables?

Each phone came with a charger, and they run "IP Webcam", a free app on the Play Store. I have them semi-hidden in bookcases and other out-of-the-way locations so they're not obvious. I usually just use IP Cam Viewer Basic, another free Android app, to check on the pets when away from home. My home automation hub (Vera) works fine with the phones as IP cams as well.

Yeah I've run IP Webcam on crappy Huawei Glory phones that were cleared out at $7.99. Works okay with Zoneminder too. You can use ScreenFilter to bring the screen brightness down to nearly zero.

IP Webcam runs as a background app for me. I don't have the screens on at all.

Eh, not really comparable to Dropcam. Dropcam is more about "out of the box, it just works" type of experience + its hosted webservice with infrared assisted night vision and motion alerts for user defined zones. Really, my mom could set it up. Pretty sure she couldn't download apps for phones, configure each device, fiddle with mounting, or adjust the router however necessary for remote viewing etc.

That said, Dropcam is still overpriced and will have to compete when the next copycat comes along, or someone provides their type of service for these phone-cams or Foscams.

>Android 4.X phones for under $10

did you mean Android 2.x for $40?

Nope. There are plenty of those but phones like the LG Fuel run KitKat. Multiple "black friday" sales have those at $9.99, but they've also been on the same sale at different times outside of black friday.

The one that you linked is now showing as 39.99$

Title should be updated to (2013)

That looks like a Sansa Clip+ display, hmm.

Oh you're right, it does. I never knew they were used in that device, but I do have a couple of those displays.. If you search ebay for "oled display," you'll see them listed over and over in different variations for $5-10.

Does anyone have a link to this particular phone on the Digital Mall site? I've been looking for a low-cost, 'disposable' MP3 player for a while now.

you can get an mp3 player for less then $2 if you supply the SD card and headphone... try aliexpress for example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Wholesale-Retail-Sport-MINI-C...

Here's a $10 phone sold in India - http://www.flipkart.com/k-1300-pk/p/itmefh68fqtqcnzq?pid=MOB...

Related: David Mellis (one of the Arduino founders) has an Arduino-based phone project as part of his Phd research: http://web.media.mit.edu/~mellis/cellphone/index.html

about $200 total

Shows just how extreme the economies of scale and integration can be - putting together a working system based on loosely-coupled off-the-shelf parts (it looks like his effort was mostly only expended on the "gluing" of these parts together) can cost more than 20x that of the tightly-integrated, mass-produced product with equivalent functionality. The speaker, battery, and display for the Arduinophone individually cost more than one of these entire cheap phones.

...and $200 is more than enough to buy an unlocked, contract-free, Android smartphone with several times the processing power and functionality.

I got one of these (or a very similar model), they are sold as "Cardphones" on eBay.

Really nice backup device, battery lasts weeks, reception and call quality is surprisingly good.

I only wish there was an easy way to sync the phonebook to Android/iOS because the interface is really, well, basic.

For a real low budget phone you could get an Nokia 105 for 18 dollars.

3rd world folks want Internet, and many will ration food spending to buy a phone capable of such.

WHY MILLIONAIRE BUY Gonkai Phone?

1.) Complete failure of security in 'convergence' to the smartphone. too much centralization and the firmware has plenty of rootkits.

2.) Most USA citizens own their home and Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans turn their major assets into WEALTH DESTRUCTION.

3.) Yes, I carry around a 'personal book' on lightweight paper that could easly be 'obliterated.' WHY CARRY an apple phone, flash it and the ARMED ROBBERS and 'predators' follow you?

4.) Sure I am a bit extreme. Sure I made money the HARD WAY. paid my way thru school by part time work, scholarship, etc.

5.) Hey MILLIONAIRE - I PAY CASH to local merchants/friends/ room-mates. Plug in LIVE CD - Gentoo preferred or openbsd and THE CLOUD TAKES CARE OF YOU.

6.) OK. so I wear the tux and the bicycle is 50US$ used. upgarde it 100 $US. Paying for an expensive car and parking it in New York City?

7.) RUSSIAN JOKE - ancient - So, the scientist wears the supercomputer the size of a wristwatch. on wrist. BUT the catch is he has to carry a suitcase full of heavy lead batteries.

8.) OH, ahhhh. some of the equipment is hammmraddddio using the newwwer open source software. So, the 911 service CRASHED IN Seattle, WA? AGAIN?? AGAIN?? not a problem for the

MILLIONAIRES....

riding a bicycle. making a chinese food delivery and traveling by private plane arrangements means the SILLY VALLY Vulture Capital guys have a harder time to track MR. Mobius of Templeton or Mr. gongkai.

LOL, suckers enjoy your aaaple dumb phone.

PS. moving most of the 'infrastructure to world diversified VPS. even CLOUDFLARE is a single point of failure.

I honestly wonder if you are a bot or someone struggling with translation. Of course if you're a bot, I don't know what your purpose is, there aren't any links in the post, it's just conversation. If this came up and I was judging a Turing Test, I really don't know if I'd pick correctly. At some points you seem like you're just listing words that appear on HN frequently. Other times there are distinct opinions though. The mmm www tick doesn't seem to be related to anything I can find. You are interesting person.

My apple dump phone replaces many stacks of flashcards for me (yes, using Anki on the go was one of the primary reasons for the purchase). Sure, though, if I suddenly turn millionaire I may lose the remains of my passion for learning languages and memory training.

PS. The posting should probably have (2013) appended to its HN title—it’s an old story.

losethos' new account?

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