Build-it-yourself cell phones
It's not easy. It starts with parts that cost around $400. Then Patel and his partner, Deva Seetharam, have to write code to run on the tiny Linux-based computer that he's hoping will serve as the brains of his new phone. So why bother? After all, it's not like cell phones are hard to find or terribly expensive. Patel says he has lost patience with even the slimmest Motorolas and most advanced Nokias. He has been trying to build new features for cell phones for years, and he--like a growing number of other impatient developers--has concluded that phones have to be as flexible as ordinary computers if he's going to make progress. "I want the phone to be much more open," Patel said. "The world's best research and development lab is all the hackers out there. Enable them, and they'll do it." Thirty years ago, this could have been Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak or any of his peers in their garages, building "homebrewed" computers without any inkling of the impending PC explosion. But the mobile world is in a way the inverse of that curve: Cell phone use has already exploded all over the world, but it is only recently that falling component prices have made it practical for homebrew phone hackers to build their own.
Certainly, the phone tinkerers are chafing at the boundaries set by the handset makers and the big phone carriers. They want phones to be programmable, so they can create their own services, either as start-up companies or just for their own use. This is already happening rapidly outside the realm of the hardware itself. Tech-savvy activists are turning phones into political tools. Programmers have built gateways between cell phones and the Skype Internet calling network, allowing inexpensive international calls on mobile phones. Patel, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab for several years before moving to U.K.-based carrier Orange, and ultimately to his own start-up, on Monday talked with CNET News.com about melding social applications like LinkedIn or MySpace with a phone's address book. That type of service, which connects sprawling lists of people into overlapping groups of "friends," and allows visitors to see who is online or active, would be a much better model for a cell phone's lists of contacts, he said. But today's cell phones are virtually impossible to tweak in that way...more>>>