i'm based in shanghai, china, there are lots of factories in china that can produce a prototype for sophisticated hardware on the cheap, i mean, they have all the machinery and processes in place to assemble all sorts of today's most sophisticated products (ipad, iphone, android phones, etc). all it takes is some negotiation to get the price down, but you can accomplish this by selling them on the potential of creating a large order or if you have some connections. only danger is they could take your designs and run, but we all know you need a marketing machine to crank these things out, so at the end of the day, it's more worth it for them to just manufacture.