What I most want is new open source hardware guts with Linux for shells like the E61 and Blackberry.
I recently got a ClockworkPi DevTerm and have been so pleased with it that I'm seriously considering their GameShell as a phone platform. It's modularity is great.
I'm so excited that other people are working on DIY "phones". I personally think we are going to see this scene keep growing and phones will finally be more like the custom computer market very soon. The fact that people are finally putting linux on apple devices is also very very encouraging. There are so many bricked iphones and ipads floating around with great displays and sensors that are totally useless because we can't run a reasonable OS.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4818
https://www.crowdsupply.com/groboards/giant-board
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-a06-ser...
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
https://www.aliexpress.com/premium/blackberry-q10.html?d=y&o...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002813523676.html?spm=a2...
Arturo has done alot already:
The keyboard is analysed:
https://github.com/arturo182/BBQ10KBD
A machine has been designed, but it does not have the goal of fitting inside the cases linked to above - it's on a bare board:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr3DtQQuUfI
It's available as a product including source code and design files - again, not designed to fit into the cases above.
https://www.tindie.com/products/arturo182/keyboard-featherwi...
Revision 2:
https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/rev2/
And the Blackberry keyboard standalone:
https://www.solder.party/docs/bbq20kbd/
Design files:
https://github.com/solderparty/keyboard_featherwing_hw
Source code:
https://github.com/solderparty/bbq10kbd_i2c_sw
All that is left is for someone to do the same, with the aim of fitting into the cases listed above.
I have tried via hot air, heated plate to hand soldering with the iron. The hot air will melt the connector so that won't work unless you heat from the bottom the the PCB. Hand soldering is also almost impossible because you can't really get to the pins and if you just slightly touch the plastic it will melt immediately. I also could not get it to work with solder paste and a hot plate. The pins are so small they don't want to adhere to the PCB. I may need to get gold plates pcbs and a stencil to place the exact amount of paste I need to get this to work. A QFN package is easy to solder in comparison.
Is there any particular reason you can't use the featherwing package that adafruit sells? I've seen a few other folks on tindie selling other board and screen combos but personally, for my money, the feather format is pretty good for almost anything I could want to do in this form factor.