Nigel Waller dropped the surprising statistic that worldwide there are one billion people who use cell phones – but don’t own one; instead they share, borrow or rent them. The Cloud Phone was intended to serve this market. At first Waller tried to create a cell phone that could be manufactured for just $5 so that everyone could afford one, but he couldn’t pull it off.Instead Waller went with a $25 phone, but designed it so that a village of users could share it while still maintaining individual phone numbers accounts on a single phone. Activation cost? Just 10 to 20 cents per person.
The Cloud Phone is a service that allows people to have their own identity, and to log in and log out of other people's mobile phones, just like you can log in and out of your e-mail account using someone else's PC. In this way users can have their own personal mobile number for private communication, at half the cost of a SIM card and without the hassle of carrying a SIM card around.
When a user logs in with their own number and pin code they will be greeted with a menu. For example it says, "Hello, John. Your balance is $1. You have two missed calls. You've got one SMS message."
The Cloud Phone was developed by Movirtu and Frog Design, after they met at the PopTech conference last year, and the development process included a field study with 12 residents of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
Of the planet's estimated 5 billion cellphone users, a privileged minority have smartphones; a paltry few, iPhones. Meet the most popular phone in the world, the Nokia 1100, which has 250,000,000 users worldwide.
The phone’s small size makes its extremely portable, and easy to carry or stow. That narrow, squishy keypad is dustproof and water resistant, so a splash of rain or a drop in the sand won’t ruin it. The phone’s plasticky shell and light weight make perfect sense the first time you see it bounce off your tile floor, skittering to a stop unscathed. This phone was meant to survive and to do; its only jobs are to call and to text and to create convenience for as long as possible, as cheaply as possible.
"The way we get to those features is by spending a lot of time with consumers, with teams in their homes, interviewing them, seeing how they live," says Alex Lambeek, who, prior to becoming Nokia's VP of Phone Marketing, worked extensively with hardware design for the developing world. "Take for example a feature like a torch (flashlight), and you might think: Who cares about a torch? Well, for a consumer who lives in an area, let's say, of India or Indonesia or Africa, where there is either no power supply or power is intermittent, having a torch is pretty important."
The lesson, basically, is that a company won't do well in the developing world simply by hawking cheap, out-of-date hardware after it's become obsolete in places like America. Companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung spend a lot of time and money developing new phones that you and I might consider old-fashioned or odd, and with good reason: Emerging markets are huge. The 8th, 9th and 10th largest phone seller in the world, by volume, are companies you've never heard of—ZTE, G-Five and Huawei—which have made heaps of money selling millions of customers their first phones.
Significantly more people in the developing world have access to mobile phones than to hospital beds. Mobile phone is accessible technology with high potential for creative solutions to some of the most important global health issues like AIDS and Tuberculosis (TB). mHealth can contribute to the accessibility of health, diagnostic and tracking of diseases, gathering data and training of medical staff.
Currently it’s central focus is applications and communication models like Text to Change (SMS based quiz). These kinds of initiatives are very accessible, low cost and simple in usage – addressing the needs of the end users.
But mHealth has also another area that is not yet well known and developed, but that is already being explored – hardware technology for mHealth. This field is so young, that there is not yet a name for its developments. At OMG we call them add-ons, some sources call them clip-ons, but they all stand for devices that can be connected to your phone to extend its capacities.
One example is NETRA (Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment) developed by the MIT Media Lab. It is a simple and affordable device (which can currently be produced for less than US$2) that can diagnose several eye conditions, replacing heavy and expensive equipment and making eye diagnostic technology accessible to people in developing countries.
Mobile phones, especially smart phones, are a combination of important features that even a computer can’t match - audio visual in/out put, text input, GPS and even internet. Although one can argue that a phone with all of these features isn’t that accessible, it should be taken to account that developments in the mobile phone industry alongside developments of add-on technology could make the mobile phone a replacement of essential and now expensive lab-equipment.
There are already inventions that are set to become mind-blowing breakthrough in public health and that require the phone to be equipped with just a simple camera for it to become a microscope that can detect diseases like malaria.
Vodafone 150 launched as the "lowest cost mobile phone device on earth" for emerging markets in February 2010, which sells for under $15.
This is a basic but useful handset, with a 1.0" 96 x 64 pixel monochrome display, dual-band GSM, polyphonic ringtones, an alarm clock, currency converter, 2 embedded games and a built-in torch. The 500 mAh battery gives up to 5 hours talktime and 16 days standby time.
One step up from the 150 is the Vodafone 250, retailing at less than $20. The 250 adds a lot of features, such as a 1.45" 128 x 128 pixel CSTN colour screen, FM radio and wallpapers plus all the features from the 150.
