Build your own phone?

Jaafa

Now we all know that building your own PC is common place these days with sites like dell,komplett etc.

However it hasn't reached the mobile market yet. I think is reason for this is that up until the last 5-10 years you really didn't have much choice other than the look of the phone, camera and OS.

These days though the hardware inside the phones are varying more and more. Most new phones have 1Ghz processors as standard, dual-cores are emerging, dedicated graphics chips etc.

So I hope that within the next 10 years we will start seeing sites that will offer us the chance to build our own mobiles.

What do you think?

cookie1977

i think building mobile phones, unlike desktop comupters, is too hard like building laptops, and you dont see much of that. Casings are too problematic.

Jaafa

cookie1977 wrote: »

i think building mobile phones, unlike desktop comupters, is too hard like building laptops, and you dont see much of that. Casings are too problematic.

I don't mean necessarily build the phone yourself but have a site similar to Dell where you can pick and choose what components you want in the phone.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

kirving

There's no point really. Manufacturing wise, it's cheaper to make a million of the same thing than make say 500,000 phones with X combination of OK parts and 500,000 phones with Y combination with excellent parts.
There are enoguh variations out there already really.

Take ball bearings for example, where tolerances are unbelieveably tight. A machine will make a million balls all the same, but then a measuring device will sort them into different qualities/sizes. I heard Intel do something similar with their Core iX range of chips, make them all very similar and underclock some to be sold as lower models.

youcancallmeal

Build your laptop never took off so I would imagine build your own phone will never happen for the same reasons, i.e. cheaper and easier to simply buy one ready made

Daegerty

It would be interesting. There are pre-made 3G chips and processors you can buy. Even getting all those to work together isn't for the feint hearted

I know a lad who tried to convert an old rotary dial phone into a mobile using a module (readily available by the way) but he gave up on it. Not that its particularly hard and you end up with a somewhat unusual phone