A “disposable” cellphone — one that came with a half hour or an hour of talktime, and that you could either then refill with minutes, recycle, or just throw away — isn’t such a bad idea, but so far no one seems to have gotten it right yet. One such attempt, the HopOn, was massively overhyped, but never really materialized. You may remember last year that when the company behind the HopOn sent a bunch of handsets to journalists to check out, and one reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle cracked his phone open to see what it was like inside, discovering that Hop-On’s $30 cellphone, with its “proprietary, revolutionary” technology was really just a $250 Nokia phone with a different case.
That pretty much sank their chances of ever being taken seriously, but another company, New Horizons Technologies International is taking a stab at this with their Cyclone disposable phone. The Cyclone phone is about as barebones as you can get, there’s no display or anything, but they’re planning to sell them with a variety of minutes on them: 15 minutes for $40, 30 minutes for $50, and 60 minutes for $60 (though it is free to call 911 with it). That seems a bit steep to us, but if you just want to have an emergency phone to keep in the glove compartment of your car, it might be worth the price.
