I was sat in the pub a few days ago and generally having a moan at the state of the mobile phone industry with someone I know who sources stuff and gets things manufactured in China/Taiwan in a totally non-phone related industry. The challenge I had was "Why don't you get someone in China to make the phone you want?"

For me that's something like an N9 (or Sony Z compact) with modern mid to high end internals and a removable battery but I realise for others it's an N900 replacement. Let's not get hung up on that now.

Suitably lubricated we fired off some emails.

A few emails later and we've offers to supply some fairly generic Android based handsets and preliminary discussions about custom work. That wasn't difficult at all but just a start.

So, really, how hard would it be to spec something for an "easy" community based device ?

Presumably something Qualcomm based rather than MediaTek so that a Sailfish port was easier.

The minimum order numbers don't look massive to me. Certainly doable with a kickstarter campaign.

So, punk ethic to the fore, why aren't we doing this ourselves ?

Well, have you heard about the Neo900. I think to make your own device isn't possible. At least if it should be affordable and up to date. The Neo900 is still not ready. When it is ready (if ever) it is not outdated it's an oldtimer.

Isn't easier to port SFOS on Sony Z5 compact instead?

Having a phone made is easy, there are plenty of willing Chinese factories, well, not factories, but I guess you can call them resellers. Hovever, some of them can deliver whatever you want.
Even in lower quantities (some 1000 devices).
Copyrights, well, not sure lol.
You should also be aware that what you might get is not what you asked for (at least OS vise)
Drivers, sure, for what they deliver.
Source code? No way.

Or:
1) we list all interesting devices with the possibility to port SFOS on it
2) open a vote thread
3) the most voted phone is our new sfos device
4) ask jolla what will it cost to get a license for with Alien Dalvik Support
5) hope that jolla Support in the future this phone, too

If it was this easy, we'd already have a Neo900, I guess.

Edit: For clarification:

It's like nieldk already said: We can totally get a device made by these guys, the problem is, that this device won't be the device, most of us are looking forward to. We won't get any sources or special-optimized OS with it.
As far as I know, the (generic) hardware gets bought in bulk and gets thrown into a big magical machine, where in the end, smartphones fall out...no seriously, we would probably get yet another Chinese android phone/clone, running android. :/
Guess why there are so many Chinese smartphone brands currently floating the market...

We don't even have to build the device. Let's do like Jolla an create some images, a Indiegogo campaign. then we realize that you need millions to build the device...then we simply buying a few neo900 for the money we got and use it in coding competitions.

My thoughts went along similar lines. We can't even have a decent port to devices that exist. What makes you believe that making yet another one would make a difference?

This is BTW kind of my reservation to Neo900 too (other than the device itself has turned out to be a vapourware, that is). Even if it had seen the light of the day it would still be a useless piece of silicon, metal and plastic without an OS. Yet I see even less signs of that ever happening than finishing the hardware.

Isn't Mediatek the one that actually releases sources (eventually)?

I have and OpenMoko and such like. No offence to the people doing that but it strikes me as an almost impossible task with the outcome being a slightly better N900 that is still years behind what is expected today... and then there's the price.

Probably but they've stopped making those now. It's replaced by the X Compact which incidentally looks like a slightly more oblong N9 - I'd love a port to that but would we get all the hardware working? The camera alone seems like a challenge to get the OIS and laser focusing supported. Maybe better to start with something with a less fancy camera.

Plus the idea was to spec base hardware and let people with 3D printers mess about with form.

neildk - I'm sure you have to be careful with specifying what you want delivered hence this topic. If we can spec it all out, including deliverables such as drivers then we might have a chance at a community device with less binary blobs that cause issues later on.

cvp - the problem with a poll is that there's one winner and like we've had in the UK recently, it's not always the informed, knowledgable people that win. It would be a waste of time if device XYZ wins but it's impossible to port to. The idea was we spec core hardware (eg. a Qualcomm CPU 6xx, Adreno GPU xxx, modem xxx, sensors etc) and then the form factor such as keyboards, screens, battery sizes is something we can fiddle with after device no. 1 is done.