General Consultant Discussion

http://sharepowered.com/progress/iphone-two-years-ago-meet-future-smartphones/ Too bad this guy is living in socialistic lala land, like the leading companies in this space are going to forgo their profits for a communal phone like this. It's this concepts that killed the mass market white box desktop PC market 15 years ago.

So keeping pollution and waste consequences off the corporate financials and on the ""everybody's problem"" list isn't socialism?

no, but expecting Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Blackberry, HTC and others to say, let's kiss away our 100 billion dollar per year business and ecosystem so we can all come together and build commodity modules on open source software and sing Kumbaya is like expecting Elvis to rise from the dead and play a final concert tour

Any socialists of the world would be offended at your comment, Mark. I don't see any govt involved here at . In fact, it looks to me like a cross between crowdsourced product research and crowdfunding. The white box PCs died largely from increased chip consolidation and high volume overseas assembly. The this addresses is real: cleaning up after yourself. In most personal spaces it's called politeness. In commerce it's ""free market"" where the indirect costs associated with manufacturing and selling are ""free"" to the vendor.

Ok, let me reword this and I apologize to the 'socialists' in the crowd. I guess this can be better described as a communist idea where everybody gathers together out of the kindness of their heart and hope for the greater good and walks away from one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries on the planet (and gets rid of all those jobs) so we can all live in cell phone nirvana. Aren't there starving kids in Africa that need food before the 'netizens' of the world focus on how much garbage used cellphones create (most of which are recycled to that very 3rd world country. Besides, how many cellphones need to be thrown away to equal the pollution that having the president, family and enterouge fly to a conference on global warming? I'd imagine tens of thousands of not more

I wish we could get blood pressure readings on posts like these.....

You really don't @ThereseLogeais. I promise.

I can sense it just reading them.

Ok, strip away my political implications on this. Does anybody ever think this has a snowballs chance in hell of happening? In addition, the reasons phones are getting larger screens and thinner and smaller dimensions is due to 'all in one' chips and miniaturization. There is no way a real live phone built in modules could be half as thin as an all in one integrated solution. That's why modern laptops and phones aren't upgradeable. The reason why the iphone and HTC One are so 'sexy' is because you give up the ability, unlike the Galaxy phones, to pop off the back cover and replace the battery or SD card. Plus, like Desktop PC's, 90'% of the time, you find its cheaper replacing the whole box, than adding more ram, changing the graphics card, putting in a new hard drive, upgrading the power supply. When you add it all up, its better getting a new unit which at the core level takes new advances into account. I distinctly remember a PC sold exactly like this, I think it was the early 90's and it flopped royally

Oh, and like PC software, could you imagine the support call...Hi Verizon, my Modularphone X1 isn't working. Answer, Call the screen module provider. Then you call them, no its the battery module provider...call them, no its the radio module... People will not swap complexity, finger pointing and bulk, to save the trash can equivalent of 2 cans of coke.

Wasn't that the principle on which Gateway originally succeeded? I agree. It's unlikely to happen. It is an interesting concept.