Oh well perhaps I can sell you this n950 I bought from china.

there was a guy on ebay with N950s available for preorder. reckoned he had loads. don't have the link, but sure an ebay search will come up with something.

yeah right, and payment options are wire transfer and cash by mail?

give me the freaking $5000 I'll make a phone for you better than n950. I could at least double some specs and implement some not implemented features.

just about, the preorder date was later than the payplan protection deadline.

might be real, would take someone rich and daft to find out.....

ORLY? and it will run Harmattan (or I'd even prefer Fremantle) and have reasonable battery life? I will. Seriously.

Thank you for recognizing that.

Seriously it's do-able.

1) A 4.5" multitouch capacitive display, buy for $250 or less from a Motorola Droid Bionic (qHD SLCD pentile) or SGSII (WVGA SAMOLED+ rgb).

2) A decent SoC with 1GB RAM. Probably TI OMAP 4430 since the unix drivers are available free, its got a powerful gpu and good dsp/units.
Buy for $150 or less from a device (RIM PlayBook, LG phone).

3) Borrow the rest of the parts (sim slot, microSD, miniHDMI, battery etc etc) ready from a small phone, or buy the necessary parts individually: $350.

4) Get a plastics expert to made blueprints for bard to implement the screen into a thin profile tilt design (from N97).
Have custom made front navigation buttons (Back, Home, Menu).
Have a custom made 5row qwerty keypad (or gamepad if u desire).
Have the processor and all the parts fit into the bottom portion.
$1,000+ or less if you bring in your expertise.

5) Load Android AOSP and make a hybrid port from several sources (devices like Droid3, LG Optimus Prime, etc etc).
Push in the drivers. Now you have a developers phone with beta software.
$1,000 for software expert, or less with open source effort.

6) Polish the software if possible.
There you have it, an awesome phone with great attributes for <$3,000

7) Find the source of the products (ie buy in bulk of 1,000), now each device costs ~$1,000 instead of $2,500.
Sell devices with minimal profit, and hope for development.
Get native ubuntu ported (MeeGo is trash at the moment).

8) Win the large lottery, and strike a small deal with the manufacturers. The quality will shoot to Samsung/HTC level and each handset will cost $500 to manufacture, where HTC makes at half that price.
The software (OS 2.3.5) will be 98% polished.
Sell phone unlocked and outright (as developer device to protect from infringements) for $800 and it will sell like hotcakes.

Yeah... And oh someone got in to it already. Named Smoku

http://cordiahd.org/

Just go here http://cordiatab.com/misc/preorder and order 15 units to him(costs less than $5000) and I'm sure he will appreciate it.

I don't want to be rude, but with $5000 you might get the designing part done in real life (e: kangal's point number 4) if you are really lucky, manufacturing, assembly etc will also cost something...