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Hmm -- what do you mean by that? The wiki says, "The Neo1973 uses quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) so any GSM provider in the world should be compatible."

"Personally, I'm holding out for whenever it can reliably make phone calls with a GUI"

So install QTopia on it...

Example review

And a little bit of research is a little different to posting to Slashdot, isn't it?

FWIW http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware. Of course, on any platform, it's clearly WIP.

In any case, the Greenphone is way too expensive to purchase for personal use:

http://trolltech.com/products/qtopia/greenphone/greenphone_pricing ($695)

The user version of the Neo will be around $450 or so - still pricey - but I might be able to justify it. I'm still considering one of the iPhone clones (Cect P168 et al at $160 or so), despite some of their nastiness (including being nothing to do with Linux). Either way, I'd only make $5 of calls per month.

If you already have the phone, it meant you bought a phase 1 device, about which the site clearly states (in bold, on the front page) that "currently it is not suitable for users". I'm sorry, but your complaints are entirely your own fault.

hmm. actually, the device the article is about - Neo1973 - is pretty much open.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_Hardware

few things are closed for quite valid reasons, but hopefully with time this will have a chance to improve.

You might find useful information (concerning the first OpenMoko compatible phone) on this page : http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Neo1973
The end user version is the one named "Phase 2" (GTA02, "Mass Market").
Allong with hardware specs, you'll find there an estimated timeline :
        * Sep 20 - GTA02v3 design finalised.
        * Oct 20 - GTA02v3 design produced, and shipped to qualified developers.
        * Nov 20 - GTA02v3 design verified through testing by developers.
        * Dec 10 - GTA02v3 produced in moderate volume
        * Dec 20 - GTA02v3 goes on sale
        * Dec 25 - GTA02v3 arrives

here it is

Of course it's not the ONLY Linux app I've ever tried. Do you honestly believe that there are people out there who would (or even could) do that to themselves?

You can call it biased and inflammatory if you want, but it's a perfect example of taking something beautiful and well engineered, copying it, and making something that's almost unusable.

I couldn't believe how bad simple things like wheel acceleration and fonts were.

I don't doubt that it was fun for you, but this is something for people who want to run Linux on their toaster. Once you remove the novelty of that, there's no there there.

iPod Linux might be a particularly bad case, but it's typical of FOSS.

If you're not happy with my iPod example, how about OpenMoko? It's like somebody went out of their way to make an iPhone clone that totally misses the point.

To be fair - I haven't used the latest versions of Open Office, Gnome, KDE, so maybe things have changed dramatically in the last year or so, but my experience with iPod Linux was absolutely typical and representative of my experience with other open source software.

Developers make shoddy, half-assed copies of closed source software and then bitch and moan when somebody points out that it's a poor imitation that totally misses the point. It's the user's fault! We're just biased against Linux!

It's probably no coincidence that the one piece of open source software I have used (and actually continue to use on a daily basis) with a UI that doesn't suck is Eclipse. In addition to having solid commercial roots, I'm sure that its quality stems in no small part from the fact that it's used primarily by developers (and even then, it leaves some things to be desired).

You say yourself that you're a longtime Linux user - well I'm sorry, but there's your problem. You're too close to this to see it clearly. You are by definition someone who is willing to put open source ahead of usability.

This is why I like OS X.

It's certainly not perfect but Apple has teams of people who sweat the small stuff. You can feel it - it permeates almost every aspect of the OS.

In the interest of equal time, it's also why I like Microsoft's Office 2007 Ribbons.

Somebody actually went out and did usability testing, and measured things like how long it takes a novice or expert to perform a given task. They moved things around, played with it, and spent a lot of time and effort on things that most of the FOSS community seems to think are hardly an afterthought.

Just for emphasis - I'm not against open source.

In fact, I would argue that by being realistic and pointing out things that can and should be fixed, I'm doing more to promote the use of FOSS than someone who turns a blind eye and pretends that it's all wine and roses.

Forget hacking some phone and blowing away the warranty. A little more elegant solution here

And where exactly can I purchase one of those Openmokos?

First you buy the iPhone and then you pay more to unlock it? Is that how much 'freedom' costs?

Next thing we know Apple will buy-out the company and start selling unlocked iPhones at a premium..

At the risk of sounding trollish, the pro-consumer OpenMoko looks very appealing in light of Apple's good-looking but artificially tied-down device.

This is hardly the biggest announcement today, though it may be fake the GPhone seems to be gathering a lot of buzz.

The GPhone!

Too bad Slashdot didn't run this, it would have made an interesting conversation even if it was fake :)

My current phone is free (totally) so buying an expensive one kind of sucks, the prices are massively inflated (as evidenced by their lake of VOIP software), the Gphone doesn't seem to have these problems as much as it has advertising problems (which might be solved with say the ability to use "delivery pizza" to have it suggest a pizza place)... A Free phone with VOIP and the ability to hook up to any GSM provider would be totally kickass.

It's not the OpenMoko but it'll do to show the telecoms the future. They can panic and make their service better or they can grab for quick profits and speed the transition, I don't care which they choose (I already have a free phone remember). Cell phone bills are way too high, they shouldn't need 3 hours of service [$10 hr x 3] per phone, that's just crazy talk.

And "how the FUCK" can you fail to notice that currently it is not suitable for users*their exact words)?

Yes, I am all for OpenMoko and Free Software, I hope they do a great job. But it is absolutely ridiculous for you ignore the fact that for the average non-technical user, a polished, working product that exists now has a real practical value over something that is still in "pre-alpha" (again, their words) development.

Currently it is not suitable for users. The state of the software at the moment is pre-alpha. If you order a Neo1973, DO NOT expect to be able to use it as an everyday phone until October 2007 at the soonest, and probably later.

When there are good projects like the Neo that are on their way?

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973
have fun :)

This is why I would bite the bullet and buy an unlocked phone where the carrier cannot sabotage my phone's capabilities. Speaking of unlocked phones, who's looking forward to the Neo1973?

I am (and some of my friends are, too).

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973

Availability of GTA02 version scheduled for October ;-)

As stated in other post:

If you'd have done a tiny bit of searching, you'd see that the version available right now is the developer edition (aka GTA01). This version was designed with price in mind. It purposely lacks some non-essential features to make it more affordable to developers. The next revision is the consumer edition (aka GTA02) which happens to be coming out in October. If my math is correct, that's only 2 months away...

Then there's the fact that the phone that's available doesn't have WiFi (a deal breaker for me), nor a camera (which kind of sucks, but maybe forgivable).

In short, this is a few years away from being any sort of competitor with the iPhone or S60-based phones.

Why not buy an OpenMoko phone? Well, it's certainly poised to bring the same success to the mobile phone market as we've been seeing with Linux on the desktop.

from http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Developer_preview
What you can expect
a functional bootloader with support for firmware upgrades
a functional Linux kernel with basic drivers for the various hardware subsystems, with small bugs here and there
a basic, simple linux distribution based on OpenEmbedded, that you have to install yourself as rootfs image using USB DFU
all the source code that we have at this point in time, and the corresponding build system
mailing lists

What you CAN NOT expect yet
reliable means of making phone calls, esp. not from the UI
reliable means of sending/receiving SMS, esp. not from the UI
integrated GPRS data access
bluetooth integration (basic bluez driver works)
proper power management (i.e. no reasonable battery life yet)
ringtone (or other) profile management
network preferences (call deflection, manual operator selection, ...)
a complete application framework where third party application developers can write apps that easily integrate with the OpenMoko world

Maybe I'm just a stupid Apple fan-boy, but I'm willing to spend a little extra for a cellular phone that can, you know, make phone calls.

If you want to build/install third party apps on a smartphone, why not buy something a little more open?

Not trying to troll or anything... I'm being serious. I truely believe in what OpenMoko is doing. Apple makes OK hardware and systems, but I will still side with whichever is more open.

*shrugs* I suppose I've just never found the iPhone to be anywhere near appealing.

I'm waiting for OpenMoko to launch. That seems like a device with a little more thought put into it than this clone. The guys in the article just seem to be interested solely in responding to Apple with a quick knockoff to make a few bucks.

I haven't researched it, since I'm not buying a phone at the moment, so I don't know about any phones available now. But I'm waiting for Neo1973, running OpenMoko. The consumer version is scheduled to be available sometime in October. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973 To be honest, I don't live in the USA, so I don't know exactly how the situation is over there regarding unlocked phones. But I figure there must be some unlocked phones available. If not, I guess order from overseas or something.

Uh... that is what th Neo1973 and OpenMoko is for
http://www.openmoko.org/

I wonder if Google will give us a shell on their new Linux phone.

That said it'll be hard for them to beat the Phase 2 OpenMoko for developer fun.

Can we stop trying to hack stupid locked up device and actually build something useful?
Don't try and add value to a locked up base system when you have alternatives. Only do so when you don't have any options left! ;-)

Everyone should help: http://www.openmoko.org/ so we can finally free ourselfs from the evil doers! ;-)

Spare me. OpenMoko is an open platform that supports third party development.

What you CAN NOT expect yet

* reliable means of making phone calls, esp. not from the UI
* reliable means of sending/receiving SMS, esp. not from the UI
* integrated GPRS data access
* bluetooth integration (basic bluez driver works)
* proper power management (i.e. no reasonable battery life yet)
* ringtone (or other) profile management
* network preferences (call deflection, manual operator selection, ...)
* a complete application framework where third party application developers can write apps that easily integrate with the OpenMoko world

How about a cheaper 400Mhz phone for about half the price that runs a fully open source OS that you don't have to use an "unofficial" toolkit to develop applications for?

http://www.openmoko.org/

How about a cheaper 400Mhz phone for about half the price that runs a fully open source OS that you don't have to use an "unofficial" toolkit to develop applications for?

http://www.openmoko.org/

Open Moko, an open phone a little like iPhone is in project and should be ready for october 2007. Multi-touch keyboard is an option but does not seems to be ready yet. Guys like Peter Hutterer might be very helpfull for such a project.
The hardware and software are all free (as a speech), and the team looks good. http://openmoko.org/

Try this. http://www.openmoko.org/

Killer apps, you say? Have a look at these.

And since it's a free phone, anyone who wants to code up an application for it is free to do so, so I predict that most of the more feasible programmes on that page will be written sooner or later.

I, for one, will be happy to go around to all the cinemas/libraries/schools in my area and record their location (with the AGPS), for the app that might be written in the future to tell the phone to automatically switch to silent mode based on its GPS position.

No need... it has GPS included in the phone already.

Basically not. If you hold the phone in the same orientation, with best-in-class accellerometers, you pretty much get a centimeter per second per second of error. After an hour, that's 70MPH, and around 50 miles out. It's useful for periods well under a minute, when the orientation is known. If the orientation is unknown, then it's basically useless for navigation - even if you have two of them in the phone - for periods over 5 seconds. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Accelerometer_Fundam entals - though it's somewhat slow at the moment. Guess why :)

Per http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_Battery the Neo battery is 57x38x7 mm or 15162 mm**3. It's 1200 mAH at 3.7 volts which is 4400 mWH. An AA cell is 14x50mm which is 7693 mm**3, so two of them is 15386 mm**3 which is just about the same as the Neo battery. The good ones are 2700 mAH at 1.2v, so two of them is 6480 mWH which beats the Neo battery by a wide margin. It is true that the NiMH cells weigh a little more and their shape might require making the phone a bit thicker, but I can live with that. Using 3 or 4 AAA cells (10x44mm, 1000 mAH) would have a slight penalty in energy density but would keep the phone almost as thin.

I am eager to replace my current phone with Openmoko. However, I use a SIM Toolkit application for my banking. I wanted to look up whether Openmoko plans some STK support, but I have only found this post in gsmd-devel archives from March. Does anybody know what is the state of SIM Toolkit support in Openmoko?

It's on the wish list, so whenever they start actively looking into the post-GTA02 revs of it, this will probably show up if enough people want it.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMoko_under_QEMU Try it yourself, there's a Windows QEMU binary in there. Runs slow on my laptop, but it is an emulated environment

OpenMoko is an Open Source project to create the world's first free mobile phone operating system. ...
The long term goal is that phone software won't be tied to a phone. You can install any OpenMoko software over the whole range of phones, and if you upgrade your phone, you don't lose the software. Bugs fixed on one phone are fixed on all.

Currently it is not suitable for users. The state of the software at the moment is pre-alpha. If you order a Neo1973, DO NOT expect to be able to use it as an everyday phone for several months.

The Neo1973 from FIC is the first of many phones that OpenMoko will run on.

RTFM: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_Battery
Instructions on alternatives to the official battery, mentioning also that you _can_ hack it to use NiMH batteries. Happy now?

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Introduction (there are some obscure videos)
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FAQ
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page

And a RTFM .

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Introduction (there are some obscure videos)
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FAQ
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page

And a RTFM .

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Introduction (there are some obscure videos)
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FAQ
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page

And a RTFM .

* SMedia 3362 Graphics Accelerator
* 2 3D Accelerometers

If you look at the announcement about the "consumer" version of the phone (as not all of us feel like 'hacking' our phones on a daily basis just to make them work) here, then you'll see in the annoucement that it's not really any cheaper than the iPhone.

From the announcement:
We will sell this device through multiple channels. Direct from openmoko.com, the price will be $450 for the Neo Base and $600 for Neo Advanced.

Hmm. $450 (likely plus shipping) sounds an aweful lot close to the 4gb iPhone, and $600 sounds about a dollar more than the $599 iPhone.
Maybe it's not really cheaper. Yea, you can get the developer version, without the 3d graphics support for $300 (without the developer tools!) or when you pay for the developer tools it's $450.

If I buy a phone that's $450 (I know this is against the heart of opensource and "DIY" stuff), but I want it to be super tested, and work well. Yea, yea, the iPhone has a few problems. Apple's phone support staff alone for the iPhone is bigger than the R&D for this whole company. I don't want someone to say, "Recompile the kernel on your phone... don't know how? RTFM!" as you often get in some open-source circles. I don't mind paying a little bit to Apple to know that I can get all the support I want just by walking into an Apple store. I don't want to have to log onto a Subversion/CVS server and download code, recompile it, and cross my fingers

It's a cool idea, but it seems to miss some of the 'good things' that Apple's done, like the Multi-touch screen? Also, from everything i've read the iPhone is more durable than almost anyone would have expected. I dunno about this thing. You can open it with a guitar pick? huh

I know all of Slashdot was hoping for Open Source to show us how they "aren't ripping the world off" and aren't "locking you down" and how open source can do it cheaper and better. Well this doesn't look like cheaper. It doesn't look more tested. And it doesn't look better. Sorry.

Also, duh. Half the reason anyone wants an iPhone is the same reason they want a Porsche. Because people recognize it, and they can show off.