Slashdot Mirror
Linux Smartphones Race To Be 1st In U.S.
An anonymous reader writes "The race is on for first mover in the domestic US Linux smartphone market! Last week, Motorola announced a new Linux-based business user smartphone that's expected to ship to US customers by the end of 2004. Meanwhile, Chinese phone maker e28 will debut its latest Linux-based smartphone at LinuxWorld this week, and will soon begin distributing it in the Chicago area. Both devices are pretty cool. The quad-band Moto phone features a 1.3 megapixel camera, Intel's latest cell-phone chip, and fancy sync software that (currently only) works with Microsoft email servers at this point (others pending). e28's phone is an upgrade to its previously announced e2800, which became the world's first commercially available Linux phone when it shipped in China in August, 2003 [Slashdot discussion]. Interestingly, e28 was founded in 2002 by the former president of Mot's Asia Pacific cell phone division -- the world's largest mobile market."
Competition is great, I would love to get a smart phone that runs linux based kernel and allows for development without strings attached. Currently, Symbian phones are difficult to debug for. Microsoft phones... I won't even go into that.
;)
Some phone manufacturers are attempting to lock users from installing their own custom software, some are trying to prevent people writing for the phones without paying royalties (signed apps).
Power to the user, if I can tweak with my phone as much as I can do with my pc - it's all good news.
I just hope it won't take minutes to boot like my Fedora Core 2 at the moment
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
Check out their new RAZR V3 as well ...
iam fed up of carrying around multiple gadgets (and chargers etc) when they could be assimilated into a single device making my life a bit more convient than looking like batmans toolbelt
heres wishing
The article said it only Sync'd with Microsoft email, but the Motorola does POP3 and IMAP4 email communication too. The fact that it syncs with MS proprietary stuff is in addition to supporting the standards.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I love the lousy camera in my phone. I do a lot of business travel (in europe) and it is nice to have a camera to take shots of various landmarks. I never have my good camera "handy".
However the point about some firms not liking cameras it valid. I wish the camera could be physically extracted so I could leave it at the desk sometimes, instead of the entire unit.
It was comming out in august I think. I'll wait for that. Personally I like a full keyboard and the ability to type faster than with 1 as 'a', 'b', and 'c'. I can also ssh into my linux server, which is more powerful than anyfone could hope to be (well maybe not 30 or more years down the line ;). Selling point for me are 'full' keyboards.
Things really take off when you put mesh routing into VoIP phones and they start jabbering at each other.
Seastead this.