Would you pay $400 for a handful of microchips and, armed with only a circuit diagram, build your own cellphone? With elegant, powerful phones already on sale for a fraction of the price it’s not something that will appeal to many.
Yet despite the cost and inconvenience, a growing group of techies are attempting to build the first practical home-made cellphones. They hope to spark greater innovation in cellphone design and, more crucially, in the software that makes the phones work. Their aim is to develop a critical mass of free software that will lead to a flowering of new…
