I'm trying not to be the management type that stops an engineer or accountant in their tracks when they throw up reasons why something can't be done but so far these all sound like solvable problems to me. Sure, we could pick a Sony and then do a kick *** port to that, and I for one would be happy, but the idea is to build a relationship with an ODM. 1) Start with an almost off the shelf design they have that can be a base port. 2) sell n hundred / thousand 3) do the niche versions with keyboards / huge batteries / big screens / small screens / IR ports / fins
Which brings me back to the first post. How hard would that be? Surely we could come up with a list of components that would be the least trouble to port to? eg. CPU: Snapdragon 615, Camera Sensor: Sony IMX300... etc