Why it arrives as parts

There is an hour in every MAKERphone build that I think about more than any other. The board is populated. Every component is in its place, the joints are done, the screen is seated. You put the battery in, press the button — and for a good number of people, nothing happens.

That hour is the product. Everything else about this phone you could buy already finished, made better and sold cheaper, by companies with factories the size of towns. What you cannot buy finished is the twenty minutes you then spend working out that one joint on the power rail never quite took.

A finished thing teaches you nothing about itself

Hand somebody a working phone and they learn how to use a phone. Hand them the same phone in pieces and they learn what is inside a phone, which parts talk to which, and — the useful bit — what it feels like when something does not work and the only way forward is to find out why.

That last skill is the one I actually care about. Soldering is a manual trick; most people have it after a dozen joints. Debugging is a habit of mind. It is the willingness to stop guessing, form a theory, test the theory, and be wrong four times in a row without deciding you are stupid. Nobody is born with that. You get it by having something in front of you that refuses to work and refusing to put it down.

Every kit we have made since 2017 has been an excuse to put someone in that position. More than 300,000 of them have gone out. The soldering iron is a pretext.

Yes, it makes the product harder to sell

I am not going to pretend otherwise. A box that needs two hours, a soldering iron and a tolerant adult converts worse than a box you open and switch on. It gets returned more. It generates support email that a finished product never would. Every honest retail instinct says to pre-assemble it and drop the price of the guilt.

We keep not doing that, and the reason is simple arithmetic about what is left afterwards. Take the build out and you have a mid-range gadget competing with companies who are much better at making mid-range gadgets than we are. Leave it in and you have the only phone that its owner can say they made. Removing that hour would make MAKERphone easier to sell and worth considerably less.

Then you get the other half

Soldering is the part people notice, but it is the smaller half. Once the thing boots, it is a computer you own completely, and you write what runs on it — MicroPython if you are starting out, Arduino C++ if you want to go lower. Not a locked device that permits a few approved customisations. A device where the next thing it does is whatever you decide it does.

That is the sentence that makes it a phone worth building rather than a kit worth assembling. The build teaches you that hardware is comprehensible. The code teaches you that it is yours.

Who it is actually for

Two groups, and they want different things from it. There are children — our younger line starts at seven, with an adult nearby and no prior electronics — for whom the point is discovering that the objects around them were made by people and can be understood. And there are adults who have wanted to know what is inside a phone since they were eleven and have never had a good excuse.

Both get the same hour. Nobody is too old to be delighted that a thing they soldered together rings.

MAKERphone 2.0 is on Kickstarter until 10 October, if you would like an excuse of your own.