Call me negative, but I am certain it will either be vaporware (never be released) or a failure like the WeTab.
Maybe it won't be this company who will succeed at doing it, maybe there will be lots of companies doing it, but I can certainly see that someday we will have this kind of option. I just hope it happens sooner than later.
Look, aw3c2 wasn't saying there weren't ever going to be custom phones, but this company's been doing an awful lot of press work, only having a Photoshop mockup and website to show for it.
The picture of the circuit board isn't even a mobile phone circuit. The company's makes no mention of prototypes or any hardware engineering. I would expect to see this stuff for a company shipping Q1 2011.
I can see a lot of geeks being into the idea but I can't see it being mass market. The question will be will the geeks be willing to pay the premium that would make this workable with a smaller customer base.
I suspect not when there are perfectly good Android phones out there.
I've learned this trying to buy a simple mobile phone for my technophobe father and a VCR that just played stuff (no recording) for my aging grandmother.
The main theme of the reddit topic on this seemed to be people excited about 'only paying for what they want', yet by doing so you remove the main advantage of mass production; lower per unit price.
This interesting article on the manufacture of microSD gives a small glimpse; http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918 The second to last paragraph is particularly interesting.
Once you remove standardization all kinds of hidden costs creep in, from not being able to order such large volumes of components right down to hardware testing.
My guess would be because in the PC world it's expected - people demand a certain level of choice and configuration. Beyond a very basic level (capacity, colour), I'm not sure that demand exists for mobile devices.
But looking at the site in more detail, it does seem price competitive (I made a phone spec-ed to the HTC Desire and it's pretty much bang on the same price), though obviously you can't get it on a contract.
We'll see. One thing that does occur is that their phones will presumably ship with vanilla Android rather than a network / manufacturer modified version. I know people who'd pay extra for that.
UPDATE: Just realised that the HTC price included tax, the custom build didn't. Wouldn't be huge but would make it maybe 10% more than the Desire,
Maybe, but there could be lots of niches. Actually I'd like to see it taken a step further where you can buy your own peripherals from different manufacturers and attach them to your phone. The device might not even end up being or looking like a 'phone'. But why not use a modern mobile OS as a controller for other mobile peripherals?