Looking through the posts I can see that there are two goals to achieve:
1. To keep maemo/fre(e)mantle alive
2. To develop (promote) an open hardware platform

In he long run it is impossible to achieve the first goal without achieving the second - so the second goal should be the primary one.
If this open device is to succeed, there is a need to deliver it in grate quantities.
Operating N900 are currently in order of 10k of units now (I've heard about 30k in January). We'd need almost all current users to commit to this idea to make the price and the hardware appealing to all - according to dos1:

But in order to achieve this volume I think that there is a need to allay with all possible projects that might be interested in developing open HW phone and maybe not only a phone.
First I thought about open pandora project - since it has quite similar specs to GTA04 (they also might want to refresh their hw specs).
Additionally I think that companies like jolla and canonical (ubuntu) might be interested in supporting a community/open phone. None of them has qwerty phone in their portfolio and supporting the community sends good PR message. Both are SW companies, so having some open HW at hands would be good to them.

In terms of specs I'd like to see something similar to http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/...n-the-droid-5/ .
Maybe some parts of Edge design can be incorporated (canonical claims it has negotiated better prices on them).

It might be good to seek some support from some open/free software/hardware foundations/associations.