Bunnie Huang paid a visit to Shenzhen's Mingtong Digital Mall and found a $12 mobile phone, with Bluetooth, an MP3 player, an OLED display and quad-band GSM. For $12.

Bunnie's teardown shows a little bit about how this $12 piece of electronics can possibly be profitable, but far more tantalizing are his notes about Gongkai, "a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching." It's the Pearl River Delta's answer to the open source hardware movement, and Bunnie promises to write more about it soon.

How is this possible? I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I’m trying to learn. A teardown yields a few hints.

First, there are no screws. The whole case snaps together.

Also, there are (almost) no connectors on the inside. Everything from the display to the battery is soldered directly to the board; for shipping and storage, you get to flip a switch to hard-disconnect the battery. And, as best as I can tell, the battery also has no secondary protection circuit.

The Bluetooth antenna is nothing more than a small length of wire, seen on the lower left below.

Still, the phone features accoutrements such as a back-lit keypad and decorative lights around the edge.

The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a Vanchip VC5276. Of course, with price competition like this, Western firms are suing to protect ground: Vanchip is in a bit of a legal tussle with RF Micro, and Mediatek has also been subject to a few lawsuits of its own.

The MT6250 is rumored to sell in volume for under $2. I was able to anecdotally confirm the price by buying a couple of pieces on cut-tape from a retail broker for about $2.10 each. [No, I will not broker these chips or this phone for you...]

The $12 Gongkai Phone

Former Gizmodo gadget writer and chief editorial whip-cracker Brian Lam has covered many a CES in his time; since leaving Gawker media for ocean adventures and his Wirecutter electronics blog, I think his work has become much more interesting. He revisited CES this year, and produced exactly one post from it, highlighting interesting stuff he says he'd actually buy himself. The "luggage tracker" and HD camera are tugging at my credit card's heartstrings, too.

My friend Matt Richardson (who created the awes.. er, terrific "Awesome Button" for MAKE) is part of a group from New York University's Interactive Technology Program that's launching an interactive window installation in Manhattan tonight called Bird on a Wire. Matt says, "The birds sit on the window until you call in, and they start flocking around. Not only that, but you can also hear the birds through the phone."

Reuters: Man tries out a Canon EOS-1D X at a Tokyo showroom.

Camera maker Canon is evolving toward "fully automating" production, to reduce costs. Japan, where the Canon plants in question are located, is a leading nation in robotics development.

"The move toward machine-only production will likely be completed in the next few years, perhaps as soon as 2015," according to a company official quoted in the AP.

But do not fear being made obsolete, earthlings.

"Human beings are needed to come up with innovations on how to use robots," another Canon spokesperson told AP. "Going to a no-man operation at that level is still the world of science fiction."

Read the full article.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook speaks to employees during a visit to the iPhone production line at the newly built Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park, in Henan province, China. Photo taken March 28, 2012 (REUTERS). Reports and analysis on the significance of the visit: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Wired News, IBT, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times.

Via my friend and fellow cancer-warrior Francesco Fondi of Wired (Italy), news that Fujifilm in Japan is launching what it calls "Real 3D Mammography," a medical imaging system that enables technicians to view mammographic images in a kind of 3D. The idea is to see and interpret the detail of internal anatomical breast structures more clearly than is currently possible with a 2D image.

The new system costs about $181K, and is designed to work with "Amulet f," Fujifilm's digital X-ray equipment for breast cancer screening (sold separately). I hereby volunteer to be a test hamster for this thing some day, even though I realize the radiation payload is a little higher with this than with current mammography. But wow, I'd love to see this level of detail about what is going on inside my body right now, as I go through chemotherapy.

Takuya Otani, reporting in Nikkei Electronics & Digital Health Online:

Because the three-dimensional structures of breast tissues can be checked all at the same time, it is possible to determine if a tumor mass is in contact with a mammary gland as well as to measure the depth of microcalcification, Fujifilm said.

When a picture of a breast is taken with the Amulet f, it takes two images from different angles. Then, by displaying the two images on a special LCD monitor and using polarized glasses, it becomes possible to see a 3D image.

The special monitor is manufactured by combining two LCD monitors and a part called "half mirror." (...)When the Amulet f is used to take pictures, a patient is exposed to X-ray radiation twice. But, with Fujifilm's own methods of taking and processing images, the total amount of X-ray increases by only 30-50%, compared with a normal mammography, the company said.

Read more. At the Fujifilm website, an explainer with images including the one shown above.

Two images are displayed on the two high-definition monitors. By wearing the polarized 3D glasses, a 3D image can be viewed through the half mirror.