Okay, while I love the idea (I’ve even been thinking of downgrading my phone to one of those re-released Nokias and carrying around a 4G hotspot for data just to get those, sweet, sweet, physical buttons back) the idea of paying $400 for the thing seems kind of absurd to me. They’re not giving a lot in the way of specifications here, so based on the stated purpose of the design I’m inclined to think that this isn’t much more than a baseband radio and a middling ARM CPU. Built at volume, the BOM is going to be well under even the $200–A Qualcomm Snapdragon costs about $25 per unit, a 4 inch e-paper display with a breakout board and everything you need to make it plug-and-play with RasPi or something of that ilk costs less than 30 bucks. There isn’t really much else to the thing, so given that, I’m guessing that once it’s all said and done these things probably end up costing about 50-75 dollars to have made and shipped here. There’s other costs involved like packaging and such, but at volume we’re talking a couple dollars at most. If the MSRP was $200, then maybe, but I’m not going to pay more than 4x as much for a thing that does 10x less.
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