Yes, building a cell phone is simply something a small group of people cannot do successfully. I used to develop software for Openmoko phones, the N900, and ot

Yes, building a cell phone is simply something a small group of people cannot do successfully. I used to develop software for Openmoko phones, the N900, and other early Linux phones. Those projects had several decedent projects, all of which failed. There are several show-stoppers: 1) chip vendors won't talk to you if you are proposing to build a few thousand phones. 2) These projects never produce several iterations of prototypes that are tested by a significant number of users, so if they ever do ship a phone, there are terrible hardware faults. Fun fact: end users are not good at adding additional surface-mount components to cure these problems. 3) Unless you are making an Android phone, or at least an Android-compatible phone, none of the major apps will be available, and your customer base will be limited to the small fraction of the population that cares about privacy. So you'll never see economies of scale. 4) It will take longer than expected to bring the phone to the market, so even if you manage to build something, the hardware will be several generations behind what consumers expect. 5) Power management is hard.