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Remember OpenMoko, the open source cell phone? By the time it shipped, it was obsolete. And they didn't even have to do IC design.

There are parts such as the Allwinner family which have no US intellectual property. That's how they can ship a rather impressive ARM SOIC for $7.

Yes: Your phone should be an OpenMoko FreeRunner, and your handheld gaming device should be a GP2X...

http://www.openmoko.com/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Anything else?

Here's the problem: Even if you roll your own GPS/Nav, the Tom Tom data the government obtained will still be used against you. They won't just be pulling over Tom Tom users for speeding; this data "breach" (wasn't really) affects every single driver. So one company kind of ruined it for all of us.

http://www.openmoko.com/
http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Anything else?

But I hope the prices are a little less than those of OpenMoko and friends (BeagleBoard, FreeRunner, etc.) have been.

$150 for a system powerful enough to run desktop linux and you're still complaining it's too expansive?

I applaud the effort, and I hope it succeeds. The community ought to have its own hardware.

But I hope the prices are a little less than those of OpenMoko and friends (BeagleBoard, FreeRunner, etc.) have been.

As a non-denizen of Steve J's reality distortion field, I have to ask:

Is the control freakiness so great that you cannot even install custom themes on your own iPhone?

You have to jailbreak the phone in order to install a custom theme?

By the way, has anyone been able to get OpenMoko to run on an iPhone, Android (like HTC or whatever), or a Palm Pre?

There is power in being a consumer

Yeah, like there's power in being a voter. But I don't see many supporters of minority parties celebrating because their interests are being represented in Congress.

The beauty of the free market compared to democracy is that you don't need to be in the majority to get what you want. The majority can buy from Motorola and others while you can freely buy from the those that cater to you. Personally I have an OpenMoko Freerunner. If you want something newer you could have look at GeeksPhone, Nokia 900 or one of the many other phones out there to see if they are free enough for you.

Actually the free-runner is currently selling for $250. So my guess would be it costs even less to make.

I guess you should get an OpenMoko. They are relatively cheap these days.

Well to answer the second part, the cheapest price for the OpenMoko Freerunner is currently $250 in the US. That's cheaper than $400 for the HTC Dream. The Palm Pre is only $100 with a 2-year contract, but no carrier-free GSM phone prices are available yet. So the Freerunner is a bit cheaper, but with much less hardware.

As for the phone itself, last I heard the development was continuing slowly and people were having issues with phone calls and getting the phone to hold a charge longer than a day. I mean, maybe, maybe I could be persuaded to use a phone without SMS, but if the battery has no life, and the thing isn't even meeting basic phone call levels, that's just too big a hurdle.

I'm really excited about the Palm Pre Challenge that's currently going on. It's a directed, focused push to get working phone calls with FSO on the Pre within a month:

What: Working voice call with FSO on the Palm Pre within one month.
  When: As soon as the Palm Pre GSM is available in Germany. (2009-10-13)
  Who: Daniel, Jan, Mickey, Simon and Stefan. Who else?

  2009-09-17 First draft for Challenge.
  2009-09-24 Palm an O2 announced the 2009-10-13 as Palm Pre launch date in germany. That means our challenge has a start date now.
  2009-09-25 Kick off some OE work for kernel and rootfs images.

This seems like a good, focused, reasonable goal that can be attained. I wish them luck!

We need an Open Source mobile phone
Err... There's already one (I have one).
It doesn't work all that well unfortunately.
http://openmoko.com/

I'd rather run Ubuntu on my smart phone.

Yeah we know how well that went.

I've been waiting to upgrade my phone for several years now. I keep waiting for something that is really open. And with python. Has to have python.

I'm running python right now on my really open (except the firmware on the GSM-modem) Neo Freerunner.

Well, the price is lowered to $300 currently
I'm not sure if the price will go back up or not, because there's a good chance the current stock can have the buzz noise during phone calls issue for some phones -- if you get that problem you need to find someone to do the hardware fix.
http://us.direct.openmoko.com/products/neo-freerunner

How does creating a device tied to your store not meet the definition of an unfair monopoly?

Well - because it's not a monopoly at all. To clarify, suppose Apple NEVER released a development kit at all - and so, there were NO additional apps. Would the iPhone constitute a monopoly then? No. So extending its capability, and providing an outlet for that extended capability does not suddenly put it in the monopoly category.

Now, having said that, I agree with the colloquial statement that the App Store is a monopoly - note, colloquial.

NAPA creates a lot of devices tied to their store - doesn't make them a monopoly at all. Ditto all sorts of other manufacturers.

I have a Helio Ocean. Very hard to get apps for without going through Helio - doesn't make them a monopoly.

The iPhone isn't a monopoly because AT&T isn't a monopoly and because the iPhone isn't the only phone you can use with AT&T (speaking strictly for the USA, apologies to my non-American buds).

You want an open phone? Me too. I'm still waiting for this to be all that I need - http://openmoko.com/product.html Wish I had the skills or time to develop the skills to help those cats.

No, I've never seen a demo of the phone.

Why would I, when I own one?

Now, you're statements are based off a fairly old "lets get this hardware in the hands of developers with most of the hardware working" software stack, so indulge with me a little bit as I dispel some misconceptions, and explain what has brought me to love my freerunner. First and foremost: my intentions for this phone when I am done with it is to use it as a small, rather general purpose microcontroller (what are your plans for your iphone/gphone, the garbage?). Seriously, it has gps, wifi, two accelerometers, gsm modem, sd card, vga touchscreen, bluetooth, USB host mode (plug other USB devices into the the thing - heck yeah!), and open schematics. I even triple boot the phone with the old 2008.9 stack (cause it has a fairly stable userland), the latest SHR-testing (Stable Hybrid Release) for developing applications for the phone with the elementary widget set -note, this is where the stack is going. It boots in about 45 seconds, and is oh so shiney. (seriously, do you actually know anyone who TURNS OFF their phone anyway?), and I rolled my own (log in over ssh only) embedded linux system just to mess around with. All of these are INTENDED uses of the phone, with FULL access to hardware & software (sadly, not firmware, but you know how these FCC types are about their cellular modems and wifi networks).

A fine example of how open and flexible this phone is: I broke my freerunners screen (tragic, user error, really), and in about 5 minutes I had my computer connected to my phone with vncconnect, with very little hassle. Even when my phone is broken, it works as a phone (albeit within 12 feet of any linux box). This is just a continuation of the flexibility I've come to expect from my phone since I started using it for daily use in September (didn't have a sim card before that, can't comment on how good/crappy it was before then, but it does sound like it used to be pretty crappy before then). And then there's the userspace: tangogps is a fantastic maps application, I have fbreader for my ebooks from gutenberg.org, a few things I've made myself, and enough games for me (seriously, the iphone has x bajillion applications... that all do the same thing. So much less wasted replication of work in opensource projects). Syncing with my computer isn't up to snuff at the moment, but that will come. You might be able to argue that at the moment it isn't consumer ready (but believe you me it will be in just a few more months - FSO is awesome!), but it is by far "slashdot geek" ready (excepting those who talk and don't do, of course).

Another point: I have gcc installed on my phone, along with perl, and a bluetooth keyboard with full 80 character lines of text in portrait mode on a vga screen, what's not to love?


As far as I'm concerned, Android is for people who talk openness, OpenMoKo is for people who doopenness.

Once again the Enightenment category/icon is misused on a Slashdot story.

I guess it goes to show how long Slashdot has been around, that it has a category for the Enlightenment window manager. And how certain software packages can come and go. But I hear that E is being used on mobile phones now...

You bought the wrong phone. The RAZR was intended as a fashion phone, which is one obvious argument; but another is that it was intended to be used with a headset (bluetooth or no) in the closed position..

I didn't buy the wrong phone, I bought the first RAZR when they came out because Bluetooth was a requirement for me even back then. And I've used a lot of cell phones with a variety of headsets and handsfree car kits. Absolutely none of them require me to interact with the phones, closed or open, in any way. All controlling of the phone is handled through the headset controls. There has never been a need to access the phone's buttons.

I'm still waiting for someone to offer me a cellphone as a constellation of bluetooth devices; one keypad/display/phone, one camera, one headset, one speaker-only for the other ear. I'm pissed at my RAZR V3i (whose hinge has just inexplicably begun to flop about, without receiving any recent trauma) for the general poor quality of the software, but I'm not really sure what I should get that's anywhere near as small and that would suck less.

I'm not sure what you're asking about with the "constellation" of devices. All those devices are independently available today (apart from the two-separate-device headphone thing.) The LG Decoy even incorporates a Bluetooth headset into the phone body, which detaches for use. Or Bug Labs offers a truly modular phone, into which you can plug four additional peripherals: GPS, camera, motion sensor, and touch screen are all available now. And I'd really like the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner, but it doesn't have EDGE.

And my Z6 is still tiny. It's about 8mm narrower than my RAZR, but is 2mm thicker and 7mm taller. Plus, I bought it direct from Motorola so it's not locked to any carrier, and is fully international. So there should be plenty of choices out there for you.

Develop for the the Open Moko phone.

You will have control over the entire operation of the phone, and have the interface do exactly as you would like.

We need to port this thing to all kinds of devices

An open source platform for mobile phones isn't any good at all if there isn't a open hardware platform to run it on.

I seem to recall some chatter on the OpenMoko Community mailing lists. They'd love to have already ported Android to their open hardware but there was no ARM4 binaries available to play with. I'm sure that with this source release I'll be able to boot Android on my Freerunner sometime this year.

It's infuriating. I already have a computer the size of a cell phone. It's called a "cell phone". Damn it, why can't I plug it into a TV or monitor, and plug a mouse and keyboard into it and use the damned thing like a computer?

You can.

http://www.openmoko.com/

While I believe you'd have to use a USB VGA adapter to get a TV-out, you can certainly use it with a mouse and keyboard. (Tragically, it seems most developers do, as the device's built-in UI is still lacking. The OLPC is (about a year after I got it) just approaching tolerable, I suppose it'll take the Freerunner just as long.

People go on and on about how Android is Linux based and Open Source, but it's not.

Well actually, it is. You can browse, download and make changes to the source. It is also clearly Linux based.

The Linux backend is all but invisible and likely just as locked down as the Linux installs on other embedded devices. You are not going to be able to easily replace it, assuming you can even get close enough to the system to have a hope of doing so

Ohhh, Ok. I see what you're getting at. The device itself isn't open. The Android license clearly permits this, and it allows the providers to have a branded OS for their phone. But who says you couldn't replace it with a vanilla version? I can do that on my blackberry.

Google is doing everything in the Java environment precisely to put you in a sandbox they (and the cell networks) can control. Sure the developer agreement is not quite as onerous as the one Apple uses, but it's certainly just as controlling when necessary.

Yes, it's a big conspiracy. It has nothing to do with the fact that creating apps using managed code is more reliable, secure and consistent. It has nothing to do with the fact that giving any old app direct kernel access would have huge security implications. They're just out to get you.

And, sadly, so long as the cell carriers are seen as the customers of these phones, we'll only get more user-hostile phones that implement every security measure they can to keep you from doing what you want with your hardware.

Android itself is open, it's the hardware in this particular case that is closed. It's not as if an open handset doesn't exist, either. There is nothing stopping the community from adapting Android to existing open hardware, or creating a new open hardware platform specifically for android.

What boggles my mind is when the tinfoil brigade rolls through and gets upset that a consumer phone doesn't have direct kernel access or some crap like that, as if 99.999% of the target demo even gives a shit.

Why aren't more people interested in this gem if they are interested in an open handset/smartphone? I realize that it is a little buggy still and has no camera, but every time someone buys one of these and starts tinkering, a closed phone gets its wings. This this is a fantastic alternative to Apple/Google. Plus for 100 extra clams, you can get a debug board and tinker with the hardware too.

I wish Google or someone would come out with a phone which is based on a completely open OS like Linux and where people can write their own programs and so on for it.

Someone already did, Openmoko started shipping the Neo FreeRunner back in July. There are already a whole wack of competing distributions for it. The current release produced and supported by Om is 2008.09 (which is bugfix version of 2008.08) the phone stack for this is QTopia

Right now the whole thing is pretty rough and ready, kind of reminds me of Linux 0.9 back when you had to download a whole load of floppy images... But there's something horribly geeky and thrilling about ssh'ing into your own phone.

I wish Google or someone would come out with a phone which is based on a completely open OS like Linux and where people can write their own programs and so on for it.

OpenMoko

Android

OpenMoko is the more complete of the two. Android is promising but so far nothing has really materialized. On the other hand the OM guys even got their own dedicated hardware manufacturer and open hardware philosophy. It's still not quite there unfortunately but I think this model is the future anyhow so a couple more years to wait isn't that big of a deal.

until google opens its android (if ever) check this out: http://openmoko.com/

There is: http://www.openmoko.com/.

"programmable" but not Open.
See Openmoko for a truly open phone.

You should check out the OpenMoko: http://openmoko.com/

I don't have one. However, at the linux users group I attend ( http://ale.freeshell.org/ ), a group of people who got them via one of the group purchase agreements came to last night's meeting. I was pretty impressed.

It does cost $300 or $400 depending on what model you get, and then you have to get one of the cellular services that works on a sim chip thing.

At least one of the guys at the linux meeting was using it as his daily phone. However he also said he was putting up with various quirks and working around them, that "normal people" might not be able to deal with. One person showed me the phone running X with xfce, but the others were using a qt interface that didn't use X, if I understood them correctly.

But, if you are a developer and having problems with the openness of your phones, this is the way to go. Even the hardware and plastic designs are open source.

I just checked openmoko.com and I can't find the option to buy directly from the web site. Previously you were able to get a list of dealers and also choose to order a phone on line. Has this gone? Or am I seeing things?

Try http://us.direct.openmoko.com/ just a bad site redesign

http://openmoko.com/distributors-northamerica-usa.html seems to work for me

I just checked openmoko.com and I can't find the option to buy directly from the web site. Previously you were able to get a list of dealers and also choose to order a phone on line. Has this gone? Or am I seeing things?

... a really simple cure to the entire situation: don't use an iPhone. Yes. I know that they are incredible. They're are a wonderful device and beautifully designed. To be quite honest, I want one myself! The cost, and the thought of the contract that goes with it have kept me from purchasing one. Besides, what is a person really purchasing a phone for: to use a phone, or to be a member of the "in" crowd? There *are* alternatives. How about OpenMoko? http://www.openmoko.com./ They even have a developers site set up: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page.

http://www.openmoko.com/

In this universe, in this galaxy, in this timeline and on this planet, smartass. Mere mortals can order online right? Heard of 3d Printing services? I'm guessing not. I'm also guessing you did not even bother to search, but just shoot your mouth off insead. Fine, I will spoon feed you, if only for the benefit of other readers. For those reading this, here are the OpenMoko CAD Files Here is info on getting started with 3d printing: Fab@home Finally, here are locations where you can order your plans printed: Fabbers of the World or map of fabbers of the world Next time, do a little homework and maybe you won't look like an idiot.

http://www.openmoko.com/product.html

* GSM
o Tri band 850/1800/1900 MHz
o Tri band 900/1800/1900 MHz

http://www.openmoko.com/

Well if it you want a cell phone that is analogous to the OLPC, then then you want the Neo FreeRunner from Openmoko, not the iPhone.

If you clicked on "gallery" then you would have seen screenshots:

http://www.openmoko.com/product-gallery.html

A list of applications is a bit harder to find, but it is on the wiki:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Openmoko_Core_Applications

Of course, this is just the "core applications". Since it is an open platform, there are quite a few more, in the usual mixed states of maturity. :)

And since this phone is targeted at developers, if you don't want to write apps then no reason you should get one.

http://www.openmoko.com/product.html

before giving specifications

Here: http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=Neo%20Freerunner

Also check: http://www.openmoko.com/store.html

That is until the NEO mouse evolves.

Will a bluetooth mouse work with this Neo?

It is still in coming soon status at http://openmoko.com/

Close, but those are the specs for the Neo1973, the free runner specs are here:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner

(added wifi and faster cpu)

Further details here:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GTA02_Hardware

I agree - the submission is bad... there's no mentioning of the phone being for sale on http://openmoko.com/ - just a "coming soon" note.

here are teh REAL specs from openmoko's website:

        * 2.8" VGA TFT color display
        * Touchscreen, usable with stylus or fingers
        * 266MHz Samsung System on a Chip (SOC)
        * USB 1.1, switchable between Client and Host (unpowered)
        * Integrated AGPS
        * 2.5G GSM â" tri band (900/1800/1900), voice, CSD, GPRS
        * Bluetooth 2.0
        * Micro SD slot
        * High Quality audio codec

Note that it has a USB 1.1 (slower transfers) and is triband (no 850 for north america)

Also the article points to a meaningless page with no real info. Here is the actual page for openmoko.

And the official site still says that its not released. The whole submission looks trollish to me.

http://www.openmoko.com/products-neo-base-00-stdkit.html

Detailed hardware specs:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_Hardware

That's why I think the OpenMoko Linux project was smarter. They chose a community guy (Harald Welte) as their system architect and tried (as far as I know) to stay in closest possible contact with the general Linux community. And the hardware side of OpenMoko has a strong emphasis on open hardware. Quite the opposite to that DRM crap talk of Nokia.

Hopefully at some point soon OpenMoko will become good enough for normal phone usage. Now there's a company that, from the very beginning, has wanted to play by our rules.

Want to get the linux community's support? Asus did it, even though I'm not entirely sure they realized it when they began doing so. By releasing a machine that's linux friendly and not locked down, you're sure to get a community surrounding you that will help even improve the usefulness of your product.

No one seems to have made the obligatory mention of the Freerunner yet:

http://www.openmoko.com/

About as open as it could be.

OK, yeah, there's PalmOS too but I don't count it any more since it's painful and users/developers are leaving it in droves because it and the devices it runs on are obsolete.

(I'm a former Treo 650 owner. My Tilt is such a breath of fresh air after that limited and buggy POS.)

Not that I'm going to switch, but I'll pose the same questions to you that I did to the iphone people: where are the apps that I use everyday on PalmOS? I have source to the vast majority of them, but that would still require I port them; will I have to use a windows desktop to do that? Or can I compile and test them on any platform I choose?

As for lockdown, I know of at least one phone that (unlike android) is not locked down, and it already exists and is available for purchase.