[petra]

Phones are quite cheap already(~$140 for a pretty decent xiaomi). The largest share of price of a phone is the monthly bill. It's mostly due to monopolies, so even though there's some news technologies that promise 25x-50x reduction in costs[1] with some of those already availble, it's hard to tell whether consumers will see that.

Another place where the smartphone could help with costs: currently great noise cancelling earphones are very expensive($300) .And in general are well loved by those who can afford them.

but what happens if we remove most of the hardware(cheap) and compute($0 on phone) to the phone ? And create place in the app store for noise-cancelling apps ?

[1]http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/670-wireless-abundance-is-...

[nradov]

The cell phone carrier market is the classic example of a "confusopoly" where the dominant market players make it as hard as possible for consumers to make fully informed decisions. None of the carriers actually has a monopoly outside of a few isolated areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly

Acoustics make it impossible to do good noise cancellation using just an app. You really need a specialized microphone mounted directly on the headphones.

[petra]

Sure you need a high quality microphone on the earphone - but that's men's , could be very cheap in volume. And the rest is something interface chip on the phone, and than some digital logic which is cheap.

[throwanem]

It stops working, because the latency is too high for the inverse-phase signal to match up with the unwanted incident signal it's intended to cancel.

[petra]

You could have a low latency digital processor in the phone/soc. At that level, digital is cheap.

Of course the other part is that high-frequnecy noise is hard to cancel. But still Bose does a great job.

[throwanem]

You can't have a wireless round trip with latency low enough to work.

[petra]

I'm not sure wireless is a necessity for sucsess. sure it's less comfortable, but a lot depends on how much people value silence.