as a way to get people interested - its cool. but the application of it is stupid.
Lets start at the top:
1) mining will make the phone hot. without a fan or heatsinks, its likely that even 5W worth of mining will get hot to the touch, and possibly a fire hazard if the phone is stuck in the couch under a blanket or pillow.
2) 5W is about 10GH worth of mining, maybe a bit more. Thats about 0.0001BTC/day when operating 24/7
3) That sort of power draw is completely impractical any time the phone isnt plugged in and on a non-flammable surface, so 2-4hrs of mining a day is more likely.
4) that means to earn $5 (the very cheapest price that a mining chip could be produced and integrated into a cellphone for) could take anything from 220days (at 24/7) to >6years if you mine 6hrs/day
5) The above does not factor in the power cost. which is probably 50% more costly than the bitcoins produced (for the average residential electricity cost)
short story: they would be better off issueing a $5 BTC voucher with the purchase of a phone, then to design a phone that makes pennies a day while operating at uncomfortable temperatures and having battery issues.
the same goes for any 'IoT' concepts that involve building bitcoin miners in places/objects that would be mining for anything less than 12hrs/day using residential eletricity.
well again from this link
http://www.coindesk.com/21-inc-confirms-plans-bitcoin-distribution/it has this cryptic remark
guote
Chief among these would be the existing operators of large-scale data centers who Srinivasan said could benefit from integration of BitShare chips into their operations. 21 Inc had previously been involved in talks with companies including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Comcast and Intel to embed the chips.
"This means any vendor can take a chip performing a normal function (say video decoding or networking), add 21’s BitShare technology and thereby enable the chip to continuously generate revenue simply by being connected to power and Internet," Srinivasan said.
unquote
so if it is an added value "preforming a valid function" ..it would be like mining at a CPU level...very very little in the way of mining but with so many chips using such it would add up
also ..I read when they were 'speculating' a few weeks ago that circle 21 was gonna do something like this on the notion of giving 'products away' say a toaster that mines bitcoin..cirlce 21 would get 75% of the coin and consumer would get 25% ...of this meager amount ....even if that is just press fud from 2 weeks ago...the notion that circle 21 could get even say 20% of all action as an added value in ALL.... say AMD graphic cards..even at a mining rate that would do little if any to effect the card..as imho the above quote seems to imply...same for cell phones..you take a bit before the issue of heat and the rest comes into play..you mine w/o the negative effects coming into play....the distribution would have to be huge to pull this off and again you'd have to take a bit of the action on each chip or setup or whatever .....to pull off any profit at least in the short term
now if you drank the kool aid and you feel btc is gonna go to 1k to 10k again and you believe the 'Internet of everything is coming" this seems more doable
but right now ..i can't figure out the 'fuzzy logic' on how the heck you would get enough folk to get this moving and off the ground at the current BTC price level
whatever what I got from the quote above wrong thou I may be on my 'suppositions" .that the quote above is correct and the bitcoin addition to mining above would not effect
the normal operation of the chips in question ..a big if imho