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A multimedia phone at an affordable price

Bangalore: Telecom industry wisdom has it that there is a huge market in developing markets like India and China, for extremely affordable mobile phones, with none of the frills. The theory says buyers of the Ultra Low Cost Phone or ULPC are looking to make voice calls — and at most, a few text message, nothing else.

Telephone electronics developers have, therefore, delivered single-chip solutions to help make this happen, cutting down features to keep costs down. NXP, the Netherlands-based semiconductor company of the Philips group, begs to differ.

Says Ashok Chandak, Director of Global Sales: “Stripping away features to cut cost is not a good idea. Even those who can’t afford to spend too much on their mobile phone, aspire to have the features that are so talked about — multimedia, music, FM radio....” This is why the NXP, with a ‘significant role’ played by its Bangalore-based Indian engineers, has announced the creation of the ‘Nexperia PNX 4903’ single chip solution for an “ultra low-cost plus” multimedia phone working to the GSM standard with a GPRS umbilical to the Internet.

The chip enables hand-set makers to deliver an aggressively-priced phone with MP3 music playback, a colour screen, a modem for Net access, an FM tuner and a removable Flash-type memory card.

By squeezing most of the functions on to the main chip, the PNX 4903 limits external components of the phone to just 49 — a third of conventional designs.

The NXP engineers told The Hindu that the total bill of materials of a multimedia phone with the new chip under the hood, works out to just $ 20. Going by typical pricing practice hand-set makers should be able, in a few months, to offer such a phone for around Rs. 3,000-Rs. 3,500 ... at least a couple of thousand rupees less than what a similar product costs at present.

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