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Ask HN: How hard would it be to make a cheap, hackable phone?

3 points by hkt ↗ HN
What I've wanted for years is something less extravagant and more mass market than the Neo900. The Greenphone was a reasonable example of this in its day, but nobody seems to be producing anything like it now for a price that is even slightly reasonable.

What I really want to see are mobile devices which can competently run vanilla Linux with a minimum of blobs, where no major company dominates the ecosystem the way that Google does with android.

Hardware like the raspberry pi, CHIP, etc is all dirt cheap, so I'd be surprised if this couldn't be done for (at a guess) $75 with a soc, screen and case if volume was sufficient and specs weren't significantly higher than those devices.

Perhaps I am naive and this can't be done, but I increasingly see no reason why not. Am I missing something? Is this a real, unfilled niche?

3 comments

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grizzles
I'd buy one, so it's an unfilled niche for me. The success of android was sort of predicated on this concept that openness always wins. It's just unfortunately sort of turned out to be a bit of a bait and switch.

I've talked to Chinese companies about this idea quite a bit. The Chinese companies that have put the effort into debugging a good phone motherboard don't want to give up that IP.

However, the smartphone market is so brutal for manufacturers it seems like it's bound to happen sooner rather than later. After all, companies like Asus, Gigabyte have made plenty despite the software side of it open for years.

The impression that I've got speaking to Chinese contract manufacturers about it is that if you BYO'ed your own motherboard design, and possibly forgoed some exotic components - you could do it now.

Feel free to give me a buzz if you go down this path. If you are interested, I have a bit more feedback I can give on how you could keep costs really low. Email is in my profile.