Development
Building a cell phone.
I was reading an article on some website about people who wanted to build their own cell phones and such. Is that possible?
I don't mean so much as in "can it be done?"... Because I am sure that if one has access to the various parts that they could BUT are there rules about such things? Do they HAVE to be regulated? If anyone has any info please respond.
Larry
Neither of which is regulated by the FCC, AFAIK, but yes, certainly there is some group you would need to such a number from in order for the phone to work.
In reality, if it works, no one's going to come arrest you. No one would know. If you built a GSM phone your carrier probably wouldn't even know, depending on how they treat IMEI numbers.
If you were a very skilled electrical engineer, you could probably build a working phone using a reference design kit as a starting point, for as little as a few thousand dollars.
But it would be a massive thing that wouldn't come close to fitting in your pocket. To build something anywhere near as small as a real phone, you can expect to pay around $50,000 to have a company with the right equipment build you a real, working...
(continues)
More info:
http://www.cdmatech.com/solutions/products/surf.jsp »
http://www.st.com/cdma/ »
http://cdma-mobile-phone-reference-design.rtx.dk/ »
That's how these no-name Taiwanese and Chinese companies are able to crank out advanced smartphones like crazy. Same with the insanely feature-packed FOMA phones in Japan - most of them use Symbian, which saves them a ton of work, letting them bring more advanced phones to market faster.