This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I have a dumb-phone. 20€. I had to buy a new one because the old one used only 2G and that infrastructure is gonna be put down sooner rather than later.
I don't get what they are trying to achieve with that thing.
I just want an affordable, maybe regents classes level type of smart phone that I can give to my elderly father, that can run the apps needed for things like his hearing aids. One that will fit in the breast pocket of old man shirts. I feel like this isn't a huge ask :(
Nostalgia-bait isn't going to make addictive social media go away, and these devices will probably end up with easily foiled workarounds to get to those services anyway.
Also, did Commodore even used to make flip phones? I had a legendary indestructible Nokia brick, Motorola flip phones, and one really shitty Samsung flip phone. I'd feel nostalgic for something from them if it had the same design (but not the shitty Samsung phone), not for a pseudo-oldschool actually-it's-just-Android-but-less-functional phone.
Nope. Commodore did not sold phones. Commodore International of the C64 and Amiga fame got defunct in 1994. Since then the company and brand name got sold many times. You can read more about it on WikiPedia
$399, what? This is tech from over a decade ago, there are smart phones that sell for under $100. Seems like a stupid gimmick only wealthy parents will buy for their kids.
Yes, mass production feature phones. This won't be a mass production product. You'd be surprised how much that increases costs. The question is of course, if one can make a product under those circumstances that people are still ready to buy. In other words, it has to offer something (can also be non-material) that differentiates it from those mass production feature phones.
$500 USD -> $400 USD for those of you that don't want to click.
Ok just $350 more to reduce
"Consumers can now choose whether to add Commodore’s custom-designed Hi-Def IEM earphones during checkout, rather than needing to pay for them when they may already own a pair they love. Premium memory will be available as an option, with Callback defaulting to rigorously stress-tested “post-consumer” high-speed memory chips, backed by Commodore’s identical, comprehensive 1-Year warranty."
so.. to lower the retail by $100... earbuds not included, and reclaimed ewaste memory chips (hopefully that does not also include the main storage) now the default configuration.
Phones cheaper than USD$400 tend to have 4 year old chipsets*, so imo if they've beaten that, they've probably done well against the current market. By my standards a posture dumbphone should be cheaper, but it's obviously marketing to a different demographic than e.g. Oneplus Nord and the now-dead iPhone SE. At the very least it might be a cool museum piece
*modified for accuracy
Phones cheaper than USD$400 tend to have 6-8year old chipsets
What area of the world are you from? Just curious where there is such a state of affairs.
This is definitely not true for Asia and Europe. It been a while since I was living in North America, but this didn't seem true back then. Although I lived in a city and didn't buy through carriers and never dealt with carrier blocking independently bought phones.
Perhaps North American carrier requirements have changed since then.
🙏
You can't claim privacy first, promise you wont sell user data, then preinstall whatsapp.
These three things cannot all be true. At any price.
Lol Whatsapp as a system app sounds like a nightmare.
The usuall approach established by Samsung etc. is to bundle a few "shim" apps as system apps for Meta. One shim is used by the regular Meta apps to bypass restrictions and talk to each other, one collects data from any app that uses the Meta ad network, and some are there in case you install the corresponding user app (eg. Facebook) to give it system privileges.
I mean it ends up technically the same as having Whatsapp bundled outright, but you gotta give props to a manufacturer so shamelss they don't even pretend to hide it. 😃
Didn't Nokia still make dumbphone and only cost double digits? With $400 i can just get a decent smartphone and then install app locker and lock all irrelevant app in it.
Or get something that run on non-bloatware OS and don't download
They still do, HMD Global, a Finish company that started with ex Nokia employees and made the Nokia smartphones for Microsoft, also lives across from the Nokia headquarters in Finland and still makes dumb phones to this day:
Atari should make a pager. It also runs on Android software. It will cost $800. It comes with belt clip.
I work in product management, this was not a marketing ploy.
Supplies are expensive now. They are cutting into their margin considerably and probably did find some slightly cheaper components. Maybe they cut a better deal with the suppliers.
Either way, they are playing smart by listening to the market on an untested product in a new product category of “semi-smart” phones. This could signal a comeback of this type of product but only if they pave the way with affordability and usability.
I hope this does succeed for them because we need more companies taking risks in today’s market. Everything is so bland right now.
I'm on the Engineering side and $400 buys you parts for A LOT more phone than that, especially with that screen size.
Are they planning on having the phones individually hand-assembled by Degree holding Electronics Engineers in the US - hence the manpower costs are insane - or is it a situation of putting a jet engine on a small car (tons of memory and a big processor on something with a far too small screen to be useful for most things, especially gaming)?
I bet the price bares no relation to the actual product manufacturing costs.
Yes, but also, ROI on development and marketing and research costs etc. This is a niche product with no clear distribution channel. While cost to produce based on parts alone is low, what about procurement, planning, distribution, marketing, development etc? Everyone needs to make money to get the product off the ground.
Plus this is a completely unproven product (generally) static landscape. Price is basically dictated on how they can penetrate a market, gain market share, and still make profit after all the work that goes into making that a reality.
Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they're mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.
That's the vicious cycle of "not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales" for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.
We don't need companies taking risks for the sake of risks though. We need companies that actually have good ideas and can produce products. This isn't much better than a Kickstarter. And you probably know incredibly well, no one is changing or going to succeed in the very bloated cell phone market.
Was $500 now $400 still lol.
It's $400, there's no choice of carrier, the battery won't hold a charge, and the reception isn't very-
So still $100 more than a LightPhone II, an already somewhat pricey 'detox phone', or about the same price as a used Moto RAZR if yoh just wanted a flippy phone made of pre-owned components
Translation: We couldn't really sell it for that price, now we try it with this price.
(Edit: This is no mockery, only of the marketing. The phone is nice)
