Indeed, this thread is hilarious in so many ways.

Anyone who knows even a little bit about true mobile technology knows that you can't just MAKE it. Developing it takes considerable time, several VERY costly prebuilds are required to make sure that a device that will surely be dropped at some point will likely survive it. Writing software, even if you only need to squeeze the UI candy on takes considerable time as it is absolutely necessary to make sure that a file access at a wrong time will not brick your device and the software platforms are not as portable as they are on the PC side where resources are almost infinite - these days you can assume at least 3000 bogomips, 2 GB RAM, a decent graphics accelerator and 500 GB of slower storage with no practical limits for power consumption even in laptops as the very same OS is used in both wall-powered workstations and battery-powered laptops.

The N900 will not surely cost much more than $200 to build, but can you sell it for $250 if you have a few million dollars of development costs to kill? No one with high enough education to design mobile devices will do so for charity, you know.

Laptops are an entirely different breed. They use cheap, large components, their plastic covers are rather simple with easily five times thicker features even at their narrowest when comparing to any true mobile devices. All the components are made compatible to start with, and drivers and their stability is the component maker's problem in the x86 world. Windows is very well-known, anyone can pick a set of computer parts, assemble them, install Windows and drivers and BAM: you have a working product that requires little to none software testing. Laptops have the advantage of bulkiness too: if you drop it even once or hit it with something, it simply breaks and you've voided your warranty. Laptops are so much cheaper because the price competition with parts that anyone can make is fierce, all components can easily be recycled to new designs and most of the stuff has already been done before.

Mobile phones and MIDs with their highly custom-built HW and very bad design recyclabilty are expensive simply because it takes so much more than just the parts to make them; you are welcome to try making anything close to N900, Motodroid, iPhone, Pre, Touch HD or even the now aged Hero that costs $150 for the consumer and you would cover all your expenses with less than 50 M devices sold. I'm going to enjoy watching as I've already been there and came back bruised but much wiser. Not everything is simple and just black and white; the world is full of shades of grey.

As for Java being obsolete: why is Google generating so much buzz with the Java monster that is Android if the whole concept is dead? The platform is clunky on the PC e.g. for reasons mentioned before: it's used for so few things that the VM is not kept in memory and as it is rather large with little interest in making it more efficient becuase any computer these days has the horsepower anyway, starting it a few times a day can be seen as slow response and frustrating behaviour. On a mobile device that uses a lot of Java the VM is naturally optimized for the architecture and kept in memory at all times. Lo and behold, it almost lives up to the expectations that Sun placed on it all those years ago. World of technology is simple AND complex and most essentially it does not work like your average daily life.