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Mystery throwaway cellphone to launch in UK, Spain

It's a mystery. It's a phone, but nobody seems to know how it works, what sort of batteries it uses,or whether it takes a SIM card - but the $30 throwaway phone is coming, at last, to the UK and to Spain.

The phone is, literally, a throwaway device. Around $30 in the US buys something with a radio, a computer, and a microphone and earpiece - a phone, except that when its hour of talk time runs out, you dump it.

There are questions about it. For example, it has no buttons to dial; you have to use voice dialling. Will it work if you have an unusual accent? It remains to be seen; we'll find out towards the end of the year, when the first phones ship. And, it now seems, they will ship under an agreement with "a large corporation" - unnamed - which will sell it to people in the UK and in Spain. The deal lasts three years, and a million phones are expected to be sold.

The company is Hop-on, which has been given at least its fair share of hype over the last year, with excited articles in things like the Wall Street Journal and the March edition of Time magazine - but you will search its web site in vain for any clue as to how it achieves the miracle of producing a fully operational phone for $30, or how the battery is fully recycleable with everything else.

What you can find are generalities, which tantalise: "Hop-On's disposable cell phone provides a much-needed alternative to full service cellular contracts and prepaid calling cards. The first model wallet-size phone was designed to retail at $30 and comes with 60 minutes of out-bound domestic calling time."

That led the Wall Street Journal to claim that it wouldn't be possible to receive incoming calls - something Hop-on officially corrected: "The initial model will allow costumers [sic] to make calls with a model being introduced next year allowing customers to also receive calls ... " but no explanation, yet, about how you get assigned phone numbers, or how many calls you'll be able to receive.

Hop-on also claims that US users get many benefits that aren't normally available to US cellphone customers - "Unlike traditional cell phones, Hop-On's users will not incur long-distance charges, activation or roaming fees" - Americans often have to pay for incoming calls the way Europeans do for incoming roaming calls; but it's not clear what the GSM variant will do about this in Europe, or which networks will carry the calls.

Cutting costs is almost certainly behind the fact that there isn't a dial; but this is sold as a "benefit to consumers" as is the hands-free default.

"The phone is made of environmentally friendly biodegradable plastic and is easily recycled through the company's recycling plan," says the publicity.

There's also no information available about whether any other devices can be attached to the phone - and the answer will probably be "certainly not" given the basic simplicity of the device.

The voice recognition is provided by Preferred Voice which has an operator service, in the US, for fallback when number recognition fails. But PVI doesn't appear to be established, yet, in Europe.