Aral Balkan announced IndiePhone today. He did a good job of making it sound exciting, in a very Jobsian way:

I think it's great that he's driving interest in the subject, and of course it's fantastic to see anyone starting something up with these sorts of principles. I particularly agree with his arguments about poorly designed open software. I do have some specific questions though:

1. I'm curious about the motivation for actually building a phone. That seems like a very Apple thing to do - whereas for me, an indie approach would imply being able to run the software of my choice on the device of my choice, with full control over data transmissions and storage. It's also a dangerous thing to do, and could taint the water in the same way that Diaspora arguably did for decentralized social networking. The Ubuntu Phone failed, and it had a giant name behind it. Meanwhile, Firefox OS, with a much more handset-agnostic approach, is chugging along nicely.
2. What might the experience look like? Whereas the likes of Apple are very prescriptive, to me "indie" suggests that I should be able to tailor my own experience to a much greater degree than other platforms. For example, the ideas surrounding a people-focused communication experience might work well for a lot of people, while others might want their phone / platform / OS to work another way. Independence means I should be able to choose.
3. I want to make sure latakoo and idno can both run on it. What might that process look like? What kind of software will it run? That isn't clear yet.
4. Why was it necessary to trademark the word "indie" in the context of the cloud and operating systems (as well as "indie cloud", "indie phone" and "indie OS"), given that the indie web is a concept that's been around for years now?

I love the ambition here. But I'd also love to know more, and I'm a little bit concerned that the presentation inadvertently co-opts terminology and ideas developed by existing communities, without involving them in the project.