Toying with the invention of a disposable phone.

By Lara Kristin Herndon
July 2001

Above: Utilizing her patented, top-secret Super Thin technology, Randi Altschul is working on a disposable cell phone that's the thickness of three credit cards.
A toy inventor from Cliffside Park, New Jersey, will soon provide adults with a new diversion: the disposable cell phone. Debuting some time this year, the phone is expected to be small and light--production models are palm-size--and to sell for less than $20, which will include 60 prepaid minutes of calling time. It will handle outgoing calls only; the consumer will be able to add time with a credit card until the battery runs out.

The idea belongs to Randi Altschul, who also holds a patent on a method to make edible action figures out of breakfast cereal. She describes her background as "nothing special, I just invent things that I like to play with." These facts may be significant to those who are trying to evaluate how the phone will work, because Altschul is carefully guarding her technical secrets until the phone is released. Her answers to questions about its construction range from vague ("We have a lot of different things that we are doing") to terse ("We do not provide technical info"). Several theories are being discussed on the Internet; one says the secret is conductive ink printed on recycled paper and another says it lies in placing the circuits in a substrate of insulating material. Yet a third speculates that since the United States Patent Office is notoriously poor at recognizing what constitutes a workable new technology (edible action figures aside), all bets are off until the product actually hits the market.

THE METROPOLIS OBSERVED:
Nigeria's design for democracy; bringing the Rural Studio to Manhattan; farewell Detritus Institute; don't fence Droog in; L.A. needs parks-- Portland doesn't; remembering Sarah Tomerlin Lee; disposable cell phones; the Wexner Center deconstructs; private parks in public places.
Will the throwaway phone dilute the snob appeal of your pricey, impossibly tiny cell phone with color display and built-in two-way pager? Altschul does not think so. Her phones are aimed at the market that buys prepaid cards, with an eye to possible promotional tie-ins such as specially printed collectible phones in Happy Meals. She's targeting moms and kids in Middle America. As she says, "It really will not affect the normal cell phone user. It's for the phone card user; that is why we call it the Phone-Card-Phone." (Can a pink phone with Britney Spears's face on it, available at Wal-Mart, be far behind?)

Offsite:
Preview the soon-to-be-released phone-card-phone and other technologies, such as a disposable laptop computer, now in production at www.dtcproducts.com. For another type of disposable phone check out www.ideo.com/studies/telespree.htm.
In response to charges that the phone is environmentally irresponsible, Altschul says, "Wait until you see the product, then render an opinion; it is irresponsible to do anything else. And by the way, I believe diapers do more damage to the environment than I do." Warming to her topic--and displaying a less-than-perfect grasp of environmental issues--she adds, "I don't even litter." This argument, of course, conforms to a universally popular strategy for justifying any kind of bad behavior at all, from being cruel to kittens on down: whatever you are doing is fine as long as you can think of someone else who's doing something worse.

Consumers might want to consider: aren't cellular phones already disposable? How long have you had yours--and how many models have you been through? The status factor contributes to the rush to upgrade to smaller, better phones as old models begin to look humongous and dorky (rent Wall Street and see). New phones have more features, and old phones become obsolete as their batteries are discontinued. Although various programs--such as the Donate-a-Phone campaign (www.donateaphone.org)--make use of discarded cell phones, and some companies allow you to exchange your model, a large number of cell phones are doubtless neither reused nor recycled, and end their lives languishing in landfills.

Much of Altschul's phone will be made out of paper products. If, as has been reported in USA Today's online technology review column, a rebate of two or three dollars will encourage the consumer to recycle it, perhaps the disposable cell phone is actually a move in the right direction--although it doesn't address the issue of discarded batteries, and the electric components are most likely reusable but not truly recyclable. Who knows? Maybe the next step is an edible cell phone made of breakfast cereal.


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