Bay Area Phone Exchange

So there's been some chatter lately about how Samsung has finally released their first Series 60 phones, but boy, talk about taking their sweet time.  I remember being excited when they announced their first Series 60 phone back in 2003, if I recall, they estimated shipping it in Q3 of 2003.  Now, two years later they finally did it, lets hope their product cycle gets shorter from here on out.   

But anyways, this post is not intended to be a rant about Samsung dawdling.  Rather, with all these new phones coming out I was thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if we could set up some sort of Bay Area Phone Exchange program?"  Buying the latest phones is not a problem for larger (or well funded) companies like Yahoo, but for small companies like us and individual developers, buying phones to test on can really put a dent in the bank.  And it seems like such a waste to have to buy the phone (for like $500) when really all we need is to test on it for like 2 weeks. 

I envision it working in a couple of different ways, as just a group of loosely organized individuals or startups that just contact each other directly to borrow/loan phones.  We could have a site which lists each person in the cooperative and the phones they have and people can contact each other directly. If anything, it might be useful to just know who has a certain model and instead of actually physically borrowing it, that person could just try out your app for you. 

Or, if we want to get fancy, we could really do a organized group, where there is a common pool of phones and people can "check out" phones for a certain amount of time.  I'm just theorizing, but perhaps users can donate money to the fund to buy new phones, or even better, try to get a sponsor (i.e. like a carrier maybe, or any company that wants to encourage the development of more mobile software) to help put up money to get phones? 

Oh, and these are the phones that I have access to: Nokia 3650, 3230, 6620, 7610, 6680, Panasonic X700, Audiovox SMT5600.   

What are your thoughts?

Comments

[Phil]

Sounds like a great idea, Maybe a trade system might work better if developers wanted to use another phone with a different OS for porting their product to. I trade you my Treo 650 for your 6680 kinda thing..

[Clay Bullwinkel]

Great idea agreed. Thanks Mike for the initiative. I would be interested in testing of cell phone voice bridged to P2P VoIP services (including use concurrently with text messaging and photo/video exhange) for which there is a venture I am currently advising.

For more comprehensive testing services OpenWave and Nokia have been using XIM in SF, which has most of its resources in Russia. Contact Eugene Poznikov at http://www.ximxim.com

There is Mobile Complete in San Mateo which offers remote in-network testing of handsets and apps. Contact Keith Cook or Faraz Syed at http://www.mobilecomplete.com

Clay A. Bullwinkel clay@bullwinkel.net