Comments on: Entire, working mobile phone with SIM free in this week's Entertainment Weekly

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:29:00 +0000

Do you think this bothers me? Do I find it wasteful to put cheap, obsolete electronic devices into dead trees for a huge amount of PR, as opposed to dumping them into a landfill?

No.

By: Rusty

Rusty — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 06:35:00 +0000

First, SMS doesn’t cause the cell phone carriers anything. It’s a use of the protocol required for the cell phone to be able to communicate with the cellular network in the first place. It costs the cell phone company just as much as it costs to turn on your phone from a powered off state. Everything that the carrier needs to handle an SMS message for you to text your BFF already has to exist if the phone company is going to capture billing information for your cell phone calls. The only potentially additional feature is the ability to send and receive SMS to non phone users on the internet, which the carrier pretty much needs to have in place if they are going to give you a data plan in the first place.

As to placing calls, I would suspect that they figure the target market for the 1000 copies of Entertainment Weekly has a sufficiently small enough number of people who would turn this into a functioning cell phone, that the value of the data that T-Mobile gets from tracking where the magazine goes by triangulating it from their cell towers, that it pays for any ‘real’ costs associated with being able to place calls at all. It wouldn’t surprise me if the cards involved in this promotion all have a 7 or 14 day lifetime, (active until it’s reasonable to expect the next edition of the magazine is readily available) at worst a month. Additionally they did not demonstrate that you could dial a user specified number, just a user selected number from the included phone book. No indication if there was a functioning microphone, etc.

Interesting idea as a source for burners or ‘bugs’ for the next episode of Burn Notice though. But that’s the wrong network I think.

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:55:00 +0000

More like, people who might have ebayed it, know what they have and aren’t letting it go until they know how high the market price might get.

To me, this is pretty historical, and a tightly limited run: so if I had the money, I’d pay a *lot* for one of these. Way more than for a real android phone, even.

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:47:00 +0000

And, yeah, this was undoubtedly surplus circuitry, so the hardware was probably the least expensive part. Binding it into the magazine was probably more expensive, but looking at the installation (pretty nicely done, actually), I suspect that there’s some company which bought up a large pile of these and has more than one ad campaign planned using them. “Watch your mailbox…”?

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:43:00 +0000

It should be noted that, as an advertising campaign for a product, this is an utter failure — the attempt to build word-of-mouth about the ad has turned into word-of-mouth about the technology.

As a marketing tool for the _magazine_, it’s a definite win.

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:41:00 +0000

THAT is an interesting point. Is this a phone with a GPS? If so, the app may be pinging its location. Not that I consider this necessarily a bad thing, since it’s anonymous… I’m just wondering whether it’s so, and if so what they’re learning.

By: B E Pratt

B E Pratt — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:50:00 +0000

The Future Fair! A fair for all and no fare to anybody! Yeeeesss, it’r freeee!

By: Jaan

Jaan — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:44:00 +0000

Yeah, that made me cringe. I have a whole drawer in a tool box dedicated to pokers and scrapers and pry bars that I made myself over the years.

By: Jaan

Jaan — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:42:00 +0000

Not a single one of these is available on eBay. Goes to show you how worthless the general public already feels these things are.

By: Alex Rudnick

Alex Rudnick — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 04:34:00 +0000

Does it alarm you that we use a writing system whose spiritual ancestor was convenient for etching into stone tablets and vellum? Or that we talk on cell phones with languages whose spiritual ancestors were convenient for talking to people in person?

My point being: stuff has to come from somewhere!

By: cdh1971

cdh1971 — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 01:37:00 +0000

Whoa!

And here I thought the ‘Scotty, Transparent Aluminium & the Whales Affair’ was simply a one-off!

Kinda makes one wonder about other stuff.

No snark or disrespect meant to you Donald. I like your post and the fact that you pointed out the existence of a flexible circuit board that was more than just a simple connector, and attached a picture of one from 1970 ;)

I appreciate how you pointed out how a seemingly new concept has been around for decades. Similar to (but not really equivalent I guess) how rollerblades were first invented and manufactured in the 1890s.

By: Sigmund_Jung

Sigmund_Jung — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 01:27:00 +0000

Now that they’ve found the device, the FBI will knock on their doors and demand it back.

By: Girard

Girard — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:11:00 +0000

The poorest members of the richest nations will soon have unfettered access to all manners of technological wonder for pennies, and all it takes is the poorest members of the poorest nations slaving away for conflict minerals in the deuterium mines! Awesome!

By: KaiBeezy

KaiBeezy — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:35:00 +0000

… it’s more like 1984

By: Henry Lowengard

Henry Lowengard — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:13:00 +0000

Vapor Paint is where it’s been for a while. RGS is kind of alive as my iPhone app Tondo.
If only they had bound an Amiga into Entertainment Weekly, I’d actually be on topic in this thread.

By: random

random — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:56:00 +0000

She did eventually say that it was android (after saying that it was a blackberry about 10 times).

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:20:00 +0000

I concur. It seemed as if they were dicking with us because 1) they kept hedging around as if they almost but weren’t quite sure it was a cell phone, and 2) me having never opened a cell phone before, it seemed pretty obvious that was a phone based on the camera and keypad in relation to the form factor

By: Donald Petersen

Donald Petersen — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:19:00 +0000

Flexible circuitboards exist

and have for some time. The dashboard circuitry for the gauges and instrument lighting in my 1970 Mercury is printed on a flexible sheet of plastic just like this.

By: vonbobo

vonbobo — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 20:10:00 +0000

“Woah. First of all, I wonder who is paying the bills for those phones, letting ‘em use data and voice like that?”
As well as the cost of tearing down the old phones and carefully adding new circuitry, wiping the old data (hopefully), and installing new software, and then repackaging them. I would have liked to get a better view of the page on/off mechanism to see if it was part of the design, or soldered on later- I’m wondering if it would be cheaper to build all of this new, rather than recycle??? Then, activating a SIM is a manual process, even more so in a recycle environment. The data plan is now looking like a cheap part of the equation.

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:59:00 +0000

Yeah, but just a couple of years earlier, before the banana-com crash, the ape scene of the 1990s was swinging!

But now, with Apple’s ape-store….

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Say, how’s vaporpaint these days?

I’m still waiting for a decent port of RGS to the PC.

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:50:00 +0000

fine, fine. I WAS WRONG. but you missed the point entirely, so:

Does it also alarm you that we use a keyboard layout designed to prevent a mechanical malfunction in a device that is only the spiritual ancestor of the one you’re using now?

By: vonbobo

vonbobo — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:46:00 +0000

I feel black inside- came here to watch a tech clip, and walked away disliking a stranger instead??? On a brighter note, the video showed me new methods, or ideas, on things not to do that makes an audience uncomfortable.

Between the “We Found…”, the excited over talking, and 4 hands grasping at one device, this video was making my subconscious hurt.

By: awjt

awjt — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:50:00 +0000

tldr

By: Over the River

Over the River — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:30:00 +0000

Like a bull in a china shop. Remind me never to have this guy help me do anything. I am really surprised it still worked after he rammed, poked, slashed, and dug with that excuse he has for a knife.

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:26:00 +0000

Because they’re the parts we wish for.

Flexible screens, e-paper… people are trying, but they’re just not there yet. They’ll get there in the end, because it’s what we wish for.

Flexible circuitboards exist, and are in most modern electronics as inter-board connectors, but there are problems making joints to the rigid components, that can resist mechanical the flexion of the rest of the board. You can cover a chip with a blob of rubber, as a reasonably effective grommet, but it’ll still end up peeling away in the end.

But this is the closest I’ve seen to someone trying, and frankly, it blows me away. It’s a technological dead end, for a certainty, destined to be toxic landfill or a relic on people’s shelves. But WHAT a dead end! WHAT a relic!

This for me, is a wonderful thing. I so wish the whole print run had contained them.

By: Paradiso Shlee

Paradiso Shlee — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:24:00 +0000

That was painful to watch… Those two are idiots XD

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:14:00 +0000

That’s a screen play, right there.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:10:00 +0000

“We could reposition the keys to reduce jams!”
“Don’t be silly, we’ll reposition them to slow down the typists!”

What Seraphim said.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:07:00 +0000

You’re not alone Jorgen – I’m equal parts excited and horrified by this. It’s an uncomfortable feeling.