Technology

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.

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:

https://www.hmd.com/en_int/feature-phones-series/dumbphone

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. 😃

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.

🙏

It's $400, there's no choice of carrier, the battery won't hold a charge, and the reception isn't very-

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.

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.

An Oppo A5M 4G costs around a bit over $150 in AliExpress and that's including the VAT for Europe (which will be the VAT of whatever country they imported it into, normally around 20%).

This thing has a 1080p 7" screen, which judging by the pictures is more than that Commodore phone.

Electronics are expensive for these things but that's when you're aiming for heavy use such as gaming, and that means larger/higher-density screen, more CPU/GPU power and bigger battery to feed those all the things as well as more memory and storage, which are the most expensive parts. LTE modules are comparativelly cheap nowadays, as are stupidly high resolution cameras and good DACs.

The only reason I would see for this to end up in the expensive electronics range is if they're aiming for it to run heavier AI models locally, which might very well be the case since judging by what others said the CEO of the company which bought the Commodore brand is AI-bro.