I was sat in the pub a few days ago and generally having a moan at the state of the mobile phone industry with someone I know who sources stuff and gets things manufactured in China/Taiwan in a totally non-phone related industry. The challenge I had was "Why don't you get someone in China to make the phone you want?"

For me that's something like an N9 (or Sony Z compact) with modern mid to high end internals and a removable battery but I realise for others it's an N900 replacement. Let's not get hung up on that now.

Suitably lubricated we fired off some emails.

A few emails later and we've offers to supply some fairly generic Android based handsets and preliminary discussions about custom work. That wasn't difficult at all but just a start.

So, really, how hard would it be to spec something for an "easy" community based device ?

Presumably something Qualcomm based rather than MediaTek so that a Sailfish port was easier.

The minimum order numbers don't look massive to me. Certainly doable with a kickstarter campaign.

So, punk ethic to the fore, why aren't we doing this ourselves ?