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Motorola Unveils Phone Vending Machines

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Sep 21, 2006 06:05 PM
from the busy-buzz dept.
The Almighty Buck Handhelds Communications Hardware
DaveWick79 writes "The 'Instantmoto' is being installed at 20 malls and airports nationwide and will carry about 30 products including 12 phones and 18 accessories. Included is the popular Razr and you can choose whether or not to purchase with a service plan. Instead of being dropped into a tray, apparently a robotic arm will 'gently deliver' the product to consumers. The only question now is, will we be able to pay for these items using our cell phones?"
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  • can I (Score:3, Funny)

    by geekoid (135745) <dadinportland AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:08PM (#16157689) Homepage Journal
    use the cell phones I want to purchases to purchases the cell phone I am purchasing?
  • I've seen some of the iPod vending machines with the robotic arms. Seems like this is pretty much the same idea in the same locations.

    • ipod.. maybe not so bad. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by adam (1231) * on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:14PM (#16157726)
      cellphone vending machines just seem like a bad idea to me.. the general public is not very sharp, and need things spelled out for them by an "informed" consultant (aka guy in collared shirt who makes min wage + %).

      ipod vending on the other hand.. not nearly so many options, and i could see myself using an ipod vending machine in an airport. generally when i am flying, i am in a rush and trying not to forget things, and inevitably i forget something stupid.. like bringing a book to read, etc. this is why periodical shops exist in airports. if the vending machine had an ipod that included the ability to perform itunes purchase + wireless download enabled, that is a combination i can see being very effective in airports; buy ipod, download $30 worth of itunes music, enjoy flight. of course, it's moot because ipod doesn't do wireless download [yet?].
      • Then how about preloaded content... on the mobile?

        In Japan I reckon you could make a bit of a killing by preloading the mobiles with "schoolgirl" content! Some text messages, photos, a bit of video, voice mail, and some music... pretend it was an actual schoolgirls mobile that hasn't been deleted and is being resold - executives are doing it already with sensitive corporate data their smartphones and laptops http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/_Undelet ed_smartphones_reveal_corporate_secrets/0,1300617 [zdnet.com.au]

      • Target audience? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Inoshiro (71693) on Thursday September 21 2006, @07:13PM (#16158054) Homepage
        Seriously, I'm not about to go buying 150-450$ of iPod + iTunes music on a spur-of-the-moment thing from a vending machine at an airport. How many people are honestly going to do this?

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by DigiShaman (671371)
          How many people are honestly going to do this?

          Well, some arabs will need spur-of-the-moment remote triggering devices. It's the whole 72 virgins thing...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Pollardito (781263)
          roughly the same number of people would do this as the number of people that could expense it to their business trip cost

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by enrevanche (953125)
          more than you think.
          • Travellers who want an ipod.
          • Travellers who forgot theirs and are going on a long trip
          • Travellers who decide that it's time to upgrade or want a spare
          • Last minute gifts

          The average airline passenger is far above average in income and these and also people on vacation are willing to spend a lot more than they usually would. $150 will often seem like not that much in comparison to the ticket. Also a lot of travelers have to wait a long time in an airport with nothing to do.

          An airport is

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by cookieinc (975574)
          What if the cost of the iPod was a deposit, and you could drop your iPod at the 'Returns' counter at the destination airport and recieve 70% of your deposit back? Or if you fall in love with it mid-flight, you could just keep it...
        • More importantly, how are you going to put music on the thing? Sure, slashdotters always have their laptops on them, but not everyone is toting their music collection to the mall or airport. I don't often buy candy bars or soda from vending machines that I can't open until I get home, so there's not a whole lot of logic behind an impulse buy of electronics that you can't use immediately.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AtomicBomb (173897)
          You miss the point: it is just another type of advertisment board.

          • Re:Target audience? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by ArcherB (796902) on Thursday September 21 2006, @08:11PM (#16158294) Journal
            Which brings me to an interesting thought (for which I'm sure my Karma will suffer):

            How is the Prez, CIA, NSA or whoever supposed to get FISA warrants for every one of these phones? I mean, if I were a terrorist, I would never make a call from the same phone twice, and never for more than a few minutes per call. Sure, you spend a bit more money, but by the time the Prez gets a FISA warrant, you three or four phones past the one they are listening to.

            Just a question I've pondered and would like answered.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by plover (150551) *
              It's quite simple, really. Wipe your ass with the Constitution, throw out 38+ years of precedence, and just monitor every single cash-paid phone sold. (You can't prove it was sold to a citizen, therefore it was de facto sold to a 'terrarist'.) Give Motorola a few bucks per vending machine to install cameras with genuine AT&T direct-to-NSA video feeds, overpay a bunch of Halliburton contractors to watch those video feeds, and put a flag on every foreigner (specifically Arabs, of course, but it's not p
              • Ouch. I just reread this and I really should learn to not post while drunk. I'm on the f'cking watch-list for sure, now...
              • Its all already done in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

                **Yawn** Nothing new here.

                • Its all already done in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

                  Phone purchases aren't tracked, but phone-line purchases (mostly pre-paid cards) are.

    • Robotic Arms (Score:5, Funny)

      by HunahpuMonkey (613489) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:25PM (#16157794)
      I have a hard enough time trying to pull a big old stuffed animal out with those robotic arms much less a tiny tiny phone. At 50 bucks a pop rather than 50 cents, I'm going to waste a lot of money.
      • If you think people get mad and beat machines because their $0.75 bag of chips got stuck, what do you think the person who just spent $250 on a phone are going to do when it gets stuck? That person is going to beat that machine until they break through the door. Think bats, crowbars, and smashing with vehicles, and then it's "Hey everybody, free cellphones!" (Veiled reference to a line from Police Academy.)

        Here's a question. If buying too many pre-paid cellphones from Walmart can get you arrested (terror
    • Was at the Grammercy Park Hotel in NYC earlier this week. In the room is a JBL iPod dock and a little note saying something like, "this iPod is provided as a courtesy for you during your stay. If you wish to purchase it and the songs we have preloaded, $750 will be added to your bill." The weird part? There wasn't any iPod in the dock! I had to call down to the front desk and say, "Hey! WTF?". They explained that the hotel had just opened and the iPods were not available yet. I'm thinking, "Duh! Th

  • much better (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 (568564) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:09PM (#16157702) Homepage
    Instead of being dropped into a tray, apparently a robotic arm will 'gently deliver' the product to consumers.

    That's much better than the prototype I saw, where the robot arm disembowels the customer and spills their entrails all over the linoleum.

  • Fast turnaround! (Score:4, Funny)

    by SanityInAnarchy (655584) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:10PM (#16157708) Journal
    Just saw this concept in Ultraviolet -- you could buy a phone from a vending machine, and it would be "printed", ready to go. It usually takes much longer for a concept like this to go from scifi to reality!

  • Disposable Phones... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Abreu (173023) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:12PM (#16157716)
    I remember that some company in the late 90's had a brain-dead business plan to sell "disposable" cellphones in supermarkets and vendor machines. Made out of cheap plastic and designed to be thrown away once the minutes in it were exhausted...

    Yeah, probably the people in charge of this "great idea" are not panhandling now, as I thought they would.

    • Re:Disposable Phones... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thesandtiger (819476) on Thursday September 21 2006, @07:29PM (#16158119)
      I use "disposable" phones all the time when I travel for pleasure. They're a fantastically useful thing for many purposes, and if they get stolen (NOT an uncommon experience) it isn't like it's a huge loss.

      For day-to-day use, yeah, they're a dumb idea. But for certain uses, they're awesome.

  • The bigger question... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tavor (845700) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:13PM (#16157720)
    Is if these are being installed in airports, will we be able to take them onto planes in the future?

  • Value of phones for sales tax purposes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whoever57 (658626) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:18PM (#16157757) Journal
    It's going to be interesting to see what price they put on the phones without a service plan. I suspect that the phone companies inflate the value of the phones that they discount, leading to inflated sales tax payments in most states in the USA (for those who don't understand this, when you buy a phone with a service plan, because services are not usually subject to sales taxes, the state insists that the vendor collects and pays sales tax based on a nominal full price of the phone, even if the price paid for the phone is discounted, sometimes to zero).

    If the price without a plan is less than the price that the phone company would normally quote for the phone, one could argue that less sales taxes are due on a new discounted phone.

    • The average phone in the US is sold with at a cost of about $300-$500 per user (most of this came from 3 sources: direct hardware subsidies, sales commisssions, and advertising/signups). You used to be able to see this at Nextel, who broke out hardware charges separate from network revenues and costs. When this was done most phones sold for about $70-120 less than cost. If a non-plan phone were sold at a mark up (normal markup for electronics is 20-35% with special cases being far more and far less the u
  • is news? given that there are already plenty of ipod vending machines etc in similar locations why is this worthy of any sort of attention? now if there was a hack to get free product from them.... then i'd be interested.

  • New meaning (Score:3, Funny)

    by vanyel (28049) * on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:35PM (#16157850) Journal
    apparently a robotic arm will 'gently deliver' the product to consumers

    Let me be the first to say this gives a whole new meaning to "reach out and touch someone"...

  • Yeah- the idea is that you don't have to interact with a person. Any more it seems that many people are more comfortable interacting with machines anyhow.

    Where will we end up?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Sqwubbsy (723014)
      Yeah- the idea is that you don't have to interact with a person. Any more it seems that many people are more comfortable interacting with machines anyhow.


      Have you dealth with any of the winners working at the cell phone store? They're almost as bad as Radio Shack associates (or whatever they're called.)

    • Yeah- the idea is that you don't have to interact with a person.

      Heh -- I suppose they'll buy the phones to interact exclusively with machines.

      We now have a generation or two of people who are perfectly content to talk to an inanimate object. This is just the next step -- people who only talk to inanimate objects

    • Sexbots, and the extinction of the human race. It's the only logical solution.
    • Yeah- the idea is that you don't have to interact with a person. Any more it seems that many people are more comfortable interacting with machines anyhow.

      Here's the thing: interacting with machines is usually more pleasant than interacting with the kinds of people they've replaced. Why? Because the people they're replacing tend to be salespeople, underpaid and commissioned. No one wants to deal with a desperate salesperson who will lie, hassle, and annoy you into buying whatever they're selling. There

  • This would be great if it truly was an impulse buy. Put money into vending machine, get phone, start using it; Refill as necessary.

    But this is no different than the packaged cell phones they sell at Target and other stores -- you still need to go through the hassle of signing up for a rate plan, etc. The only difference is that now you have to pay for the phone instead of getting it free of charge for signing a contract.

  • Soda vending machine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dochood1966 (996087) on Thursday September 21 2006, @06:48PM (#16157926)
    I first saw a soda vending machine similar to this in Germany. A little elevator moved up, a robot arm gently pushed the soda onto the elevator, and it brought it down to the door. I chuckled at the ingenuity, but I really started to appreciate it after coming back and using the soda machine at church. It unceremoniously dumps it down the shoot. When you open it, it, well.... SHOOTS!!!

    That soda machine ranked up there with the self-cleaning toilet seat for pure engineering coolness! Third runner up was the radar that told you how close to the curb you were. That was the first time I had ever seen that!

    Those danged German engineers! They think of EVERYTHING!!!

    dochood

  • Not only has this been around for a while, it was written up on Slashdot. "Get Your iPod Fix From a Vending Machine" [slashdot.org] back in May covered the same vending machine, but loaded up with iPods instead of cell phones.

  • Easier or harder? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SteveXE (641833) on Thursday September 21 2006, @07:53PM (#16158214)
    Its hard enough to buy a Cell phone at a store that just sells Cell phones. Will it be easier to buy them from a vending machine? Will I still have to listen to a speech about insurance, or calling plans? Will I get my soul back when the contract expires?!

  • Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cervantes (612861) on Thursday September 21 2006, @08:03PM (#16158261) Journal
    Well...

    I bet the terrorists will just love these.
  • In Europe the standarts are different. I'm not sure but I think that US has GSM-1900 and GSM-800 and some kind of AMPS (D-AMPS or something like that) while in Europe it's GSM-1800 and GSM-900. If someone flies from Europe on a business trip and discovers that their phone won't work, buying a phone that will definetly work at the airport without those shop assistants trying to sell you the most expensivething is a good option.
  • more important, when will you need a state issued ID to be able to communicate with them?

  • how often do you need a new phone exactly? I've owned 3 in my life. the first lost its screen over time, the second was stolen. I've had the third maybe 3 years now, and see no reason to upgrade it. It makes phone calls. Job done. Foe everything else phones do, I have a home PC. I drive, so I dont need a phone to play games on at the bus stop, and i can't think why people MUST speak to me instantly anyway. most of the time the things left in a drawer anyway.
    The thought of getting through so many phone upgra
    • I would find the person who did it and kill them with the Razr. I 3 my Nokia. It makes good phone calls, something I've found lacking in most Motorolas I've experienced lately.

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