A few years ago HP had an ad looking at the applications of nanotechnology, and one of the applications mentioned was a cell phone so small even an ant could use it. The ad polarised people, with one camp muttering that the things were already too small, resulting in a host of wrongly numbers on increasingly tiny keypads, while the other camp drooled over the fact that there are around 10 quadrillion ants alive on the planet at any one time (around two million per person) and rushed off to write business plans.
One thing that is certain is that there will be 3 billion mobile phones in the world by 2010 according to Nokia, and those will just be the ones used by humans and you can find out exactly how many of those will contain carbon nanotubes in the battery from our latest energy report. As many of these will be first phones so not the high end fancy stuff you come across in a corporate environment, cost is a major factor. Anyone familiar with Cientificas view on nanotechnology will know that it will not find many applications unless it allows businesses to improve margins, or make smaller, faster, cheaper of greener products that will enable new markets, and that is as valid for a pot of paint as a telephone.
Nokia, and a number of other companies, are already looking into cost savings in the phone housings through the use of composite materials in the first instance. While we see gleeful predictions of market sizes for all kinds of nano enabled wizardry, we don’t expect to see it in a low cost cell phone any more than you would expect to see Ferrari’s Formula One technology popping up in one of our other favourite cars, the Hindustan Motors Ambassador.