[HH] [Discuss] build my own cell phone

[Kurt Keville]

I'm still looking for a way to build a cheap navigation unit which 
could get "voicemail service" through an ad hoc network as a side 
benefit. Some of that functionality you can already find in a number 
of smartphones already; defaulting to an Open WiFi AP when it finds 
one to save you on your Verizon minutes for instance. So I don't 
think this will be all that much of a dev effort. This almost 
certainly has to have been done before, but I can't find it on 
Shouldabeen or HalfBakery...

I'm pretty sure you can use cell towers for navigation even if you 
don't have a service plan because of the requirement placed on 
CellCos to offer emergency phone calls. So you should be able to get 
AGPS for free, right?

Again, I don't know how much like a phone this thing would look like. 
To get all that functionality into a single box, I assume we are 
starting with Linux instead of Android...

At 04:14 PM 2/18/2012, Tom Metro wrote:
>Stephen Adler wrote:
> > Maybe I should first start by building a touch pad PC or an
> > equivalent iTouch type hand held system. Maybe a better term is a
> > hand held Gnu/Linux PC with at least WiFi capability.
>
>How are things coming along on your DIY tablet?
>
>Looks like a 12-year-old beat you to it:
>
>http://mashable.com/2012/02/17/seventh-grader-windows-tablet/
>
>   Seventh-Grader Plans to Build World's Biggest Tablet
>
>   James Hardman...thinks tablets are amazing, but the ones currently on
>   sale simply aren't big enough for him. ... Turning to Kickstarter,
>   Hardman posted his plan to build a 17-inch Windows tablet, showing it
>   could be done by creating a crude prototype with an old monitor,
>   gutted and jury-rigged to run Windows Vista...
>
>
>  -Tom
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