They really shot themselves in the foot by going straight to phones.
The better way would have been to work on tablets first and working out all the bugs on larger devices with a limited feature set before moving into phones with the attendant issues of regional cell bands and restrictions.
The hardware isn’t so much of a problem as there are companies who can make or source compatible tablets like the PineTab2 and the PineNote.
It’s making the software compatible with a lower power mobile device and learning what needs to fixed.
It would have been much easier to deal with getting a tablet up and running before dealing with getting a mobile device functional.
Making the small steps from laptop to tablet then to phone would have saved them a lot of grief and software mistakes.