This week, I travelled to Atlanta for work. A pleasant enough trip all in all, thanks for asking.

However, on day four, my mobile/cell phone battery went flat so I considered using a public phone.

However, no battery also means no access to my address book.

I propose a solution - the public phone with a SIM card slot. Simply put your SIM in and access your address book via a screen menu. Dial as usual.

For a complete value added service, I would add the ability to charge the call to your mobile account, thus negating the need for loose change. Naturally, there would be a premium charge for this - but I'd pay.
-- jonthegeologist, Oct 31 2004

Which brings us to "Why can't all phones use the same charger?". I had in fact considered posting something along the lines of 'Build all low-voltage kit to run from a Nokia charger' as these are now ubiquitous and to be found in every girl's handbag. But I didn't.
-- wagster, Oct 31 2004


two words: Chewing gum.
Whilst I can see the problem, I think this treats the symptoms rather than the cause. A different idea would be to keep the last bit of reserve power specifically for display, rather than to keep polling the network (where the real juice is used), or have server side network stored numbers .
-- neilp, Nov 01 2004


I think this is a great idea. I'm sure most people who own a mobile phone have been in this situation before. I don't think that the sim card slot would have anymore problems with chewing gum than what the coin slot would. With any hope if someone is stupid enough to be squishing chewing gum into the phone then i'm sure another slot would just confuse them with too many options (",)
-- gorjabuble, Mar 09 2005


This idea would be great if one could still find working public phones. Usually it takes me trying four or five phones before I find one that works.
-- MrDaliLlama, Mar 09 2005



random, halfbakery