Cell Phone Industry's Six Biggest Failed Schemes 163
adeelarshad82 writes "The tech world is for dreamers, schemers, and sometimes, scammers. Which is why it's no surprise that the cell phone industry isn't any different. In wake of the recent news about the Israeli mobile-phone firm Modu shutting its doors, mobile analyst Sascha Segan revisits six major failures in the cell phone industry, from using phones to create a peer-to-peer that would eliminate the need for wireless carriers to a company with a $225,000 phone."
Is it really too much to ask (Score:5, Informative)
Is it really too much to ask the /. editors to quickly look around the page for the crud-free one-page "print" version link and post that for us all instead...
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=259387,00.asp?hidPrint=true [pcmag.com]
Re:Is it really too much to ask (Score:5, Informative)
The *only* reason is to increase page views, and thus ad impressions.
Re:So why isn't Kin part of the list? (Score:2, Informative)
Not that Wikipedia is a citable source, but according to that and the Microsoft press releases that they note, the KIN was a prototype for the Windows Phone 7 interface, and the team working on KIN is now part of Windows Phone 7. This would imply that the KIN was not "killed," but merely "repurposed."
We wouldn't say that Debian was "killed" by the release of Ubuntu either. It was "repurposed," into a general operating system for non-expert users. But the original remains. And they're still both based on free software philosophies, although perhaps slightly different.
Re:10c text messages (Score:5, Informative)
Text messages aren't sent over the data channel.
Oversimplified version: Text messages are embedded in normal GSM packets. Most of these packets are essentially "are you there" messages and are sent frequently between the device and the tower. "Are you there" doesn't fill an entire packet. So cell phone companies came up with SMS to fill the rest of the packet. SMS is essentially free for the cellular providers to handle because it's using part of the timeslice that would otherwise go to waste.
So you won't need to worry about wireless bandwidth costs. If the device can attach to a cell tower, it's got all the bandwidth it needs for SMS.
Re:10c text messages (Score:2, Informative)
True and not true. Yes, this is how GSM SMS works. Then the carriers noted they made tens of millions in revenue on SMS, which obviously lead to concerns on the sustained growth of this business. So, by the time GPRS was designed, SMS no longer was an afterthought but a prime source of revenue. And starting from the GRPS standards, SMS can be sent via the data channel too. And there it does compete with other packet-based services such as IP. That's not free, obviously, but the SMS prices could be in line with the IP prices and still remain profitable.