Prismer2
Member
Registered: Aug 2002
Location: St. Louis
Posts: 108 |
quote:
Originally posted by JohnKes
By "somewhat standard" I was referring to, for example, generic rectangular Li-Ion batteries like a ROSE-LIP-1S1P from www.rose-elec.com Buy it off the shelf and design the PDA around it. Why spend time and money designing a weird-shaped battery, too?
Nokia batteries are rectangular, so are Palm m5xx, and probably Sony and HP.
Hmmm....not quite. What makes you think that the ROSE batteries are generic, just because they are "on the shelf"? Can you find the same battery at many other battery manufacturers? That would make it generic, just like AAA, AA, C, D cells, 9V "transistor radio" batteries, Lithium photo, hearing aid, and watch batteries, etc. Or there could be a "de facto" standard because so many units were sold that aftermarket (non-OEM) suppliers jumped in to supply compatible batteries, like in the previous generation of Motorola cell phones, or Sony camcorder batteries.
From what I saw of their website, ROSE is a custom manufacturer. The ROSE batteries are "on the shelf" likely because ROSE manufactured too many for a past or current custom contract!
And just because a battery is rectangular does not mean it is anything like standard.
Finally, to say "Buy it off the shelf and design the PDA around it" is ludicrous. That is like telling Ford to buy a generic gasoline tank (hey, they are mostly rectangular!) like you can buy at Wal-Mart, then design their vehicles around that, instead of the other way around! Have you looked at the weird and non-standard shapes of today automobile gas tanks? It is amazing what you can do with plastic molding! <grin> No, you design the components to fit the overall product design, unless it is impossible or you will pay a substantial cost penalty (as an OEM) to buy a custom part to your specification. This is usually so your design can be optimized for appearance, weight, and form factor.
Just because someone wants to charge you $50 for a battery, don't think that Handspring paid anywhere near that! Their cost was likely to be around $1.00 or less! Someone once priced out a car by adding up the replacement costs of all the components and the $10,000 car became a $500,000 car. That did not even include the labor to put it all together!
The trick is to convince an aftermarket supplier that there is and will be enough potential sales to justify their tooling up to make replacement batteries. Alternatively, the original OEM supplier might get into the aftermarket as well.
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11-06-2002 08:13 PM
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