Motorola is aiming at making a ten dollar phone available on the market, an initiative that can only be supported since this would be a new step forward in making mobile phones more affordable and available for the mass-market. With many users only buying a handset for making and receiving calls, all the other features would be completely useless.

So why pay more for something you wouldn't use anyway? This is why, Motorola's $10 phone would most likely be much appreciated. The cell phone is currently a point of interest for researchers at UC Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

According to EE Times, an official has even confirmed that CITRIS is exploring the feasibility of such a project with several Taiwanese manufacturers such as Compal Communications or Quanta Computers.

The idea of a '$10' cell phone is a visionary part of a long-range goal in CITRIS to take low-cost Internet connection technology to emerging regions of the world," said Gary Baldwin, executive director of CITRIS. "We have had some discussions regarding low-cost manufacturing, but this is very much in the formative stages, and we are years away from reducing our research to practice."

Many mobile phone manufacturers are aiming at conquering the emerging markets where there's a great number of new customers to be found. Motorola is obviously one of them and has already released the MOTOFONE, which, apart from being affordable, also brings a very stylish design.

In fact, it's probably Motorola's best designed product since the RAZR was released and the company got stuck to producing only RAZR-like phones, never bothering to change the design. Unfortunately, even though the MOTOFONE should have recorded quite a success after being released in India, reports indicate that it hasn't sold very well.