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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing was ill-advised. Even if they reached $32M it would be the equivalent of a pre-order for a few tens of thousands of phones. That's not enough to launch a viable handset business.

They should have gone to an ODM or lower-tier OEM and piggybacked on an the unit volume for some other customer. They could have launched with 20k units pre-sold.. They also could have had a far shorter lead time, so the risk in pledging would be much lower.

If they think they can change the world with hardware, they've got that wrong. The interesting thing about an Ubuntu phone is Ubuntu.

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> Even if they reached $32M it would be the equivalent of a pre-order for a few tens of thousands of phones. That's not enough to launch a viable handset business.

I don't think they are looking to launch a viable handset business.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

"But we'll stick to the concept-car side of things leaving mainstream production to our partners in the industry who do it very well." - Mark Shuttleworth

That doesn't make Edge any more rational. Who makes designs their own "flagship" phone and makes a run of, say 100k units?

I think the approach they are taking is that of sports cars.. You design a concept device, do a limited run with early adopters and premium buyers, and then the advances and concept-validations that happen trickle down to the mass-market devices and everybody wins..

Concept cars are awful things. Non working dials , pie in the sky features , crappy engines hidden under plastic promises, most of the time they are vapourware. Not the best thing to comparing your product to

Or is it?

Spot on. They should have found an existing model with good but not out of the ordinary specs (something like a 5" HD display, 2Gb RAM, etc.), appealing design, reasonably cheap (as in Nexus 4 cheap), and promised quick delivery. There's plenty of Chinese OEM or second-tier brands able to produce such phones here and now, and having owned a few most of them are good, sound devices hardware wise.

Then started working like mad on getting out a nice, user friendly, hackable OS to early adopters.

It's all in the OS, especially since nobody knows how the specs of the planned phone will compare to next year's models.

Remember when Walmart started selling Linux PCs 6-7 years ago? They were the cheapest, lowest-end models you could buy. So people had the association between Linux and low-end/underpowered for quite a long time.

On the other hand, remember what phones were like before the iPhone? Creating something that blew away the current market worked well there.

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