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A Truly Open Linux Phone
skelator2821 writes to tell us about the debut of the OpenMoko, a Linux phone with GPS that is open from top to bottom. The device is set to debut to developers this month for $350, according to the article, but there is no detail on how to get your hands on one, and no link to the manufacturer (FIC). From the article: "This is the first phone in a long time to get us really interested in what it is, what it isn't, and the philosophy behind it. The philosophy is the thing that makes Linux great... it is really open. It runs the latest kernel, 2.6.18 as of a few weeks ago, and you can get software from a repository with apt-get."
If you read the article it does say that wifi is planned for a future release of the hardware.
RTFA. They're considering it for the next version, so they probably have realized it.
I own a Sharp Zaurus, and aged as it might be, it pretty much keeps pace - absent the GSM bit.
Of course, I will buy.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I doubt very much that carriers will be friendly towards open,hack-by-anybody, phones. Most/all carriers require all kinds of certification & testing before they allow vendors to hook up a phone to their network. They also don't like time wasters trying to hook up low volume/low profit phones to their networks. The testing can cost a big bunch of dollars -- ballpark $250k. Now if Joe hacker wnats to spend that, and he can convince the carrier he's going to sell many thousands, he's welcome. Otherwise, at least some part of the phone firmware will be locked down and tamper proof to keep ceritication valid.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Why not make a 100$ one that simply, lets me make phone calls, and not much else? I don't care if the are Wifi. Or Wii. Im 34, and I'm over that.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Yup. Just like ethernet is becoming the new AT&T.
Your analogy sucks. You are an idiot.
So if it's an open phone... Does it come "Locked"?
OpenMoko does not yet return results on Google.
Yahoo shows 2 results for OpenMoko.
The $350 price tag is looking a lot better than the $600 tag attached to a similar Linux phone from D-Link.
"Do one thing and do it well" -- now where have I heard that before?
I'm willing to bet there are more than a few ways to extend this to include all the little goodies you can imagine.
Also, I want to smack all the people using the tag "itsnotatrap" when they know, if they read the tagging FAQ, that it should be "!itsatrap".
OK, no camera, but that's what my DSLR is for.
Headphones: use bluetooth, perhaps?
Memory slot: What's that MicroSD thingy?
Sounds good to me...except maybe the touch screen---tactile controls are really hard to beat.
This is a joke, right? The drivers are probably the most important part of any piece of hardware, so calling this thing "open" but keeping drivers proprietary is ridiculous.
Yeah, and I am to buy a Linux product from you? Dream on...
if(!at_home && distance(get_current_location(), get_house_location()) lessthan FIFTYYARDS) ) {
FILE* mail = openMailStream(girlfriend@house.com, "Hi honey!");
fprintf(mail, "I'm home!\n");
closeMailStream(mail);
at_home = true;
}
> no memory card socket
what?
Let's step back and look at what the phone itself is before we get into the software that runs on it. The hardware itself is a Samsung 2410 266MHz ARM9 with a 2.8-inch VGA touch screen. There are only two buttons on the phone, the rest is handled by the touch screen, a microSD slot, Bluetooth 2.0, and USB for connectivity and charging. It also has two 1W stereo speakers so you can repurpose it to an MP3 player or anything else you would like.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
... can be found on Linux Devices: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2986976174.html and also http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7056478804.html
So it can't, in all honesty, be called fully open.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't care about the camera. I never seen much of a point to a camera phone. Makes about as much sense as a mp3 playing bathtub, which I am sure somebody somewere made.
Sure it's convient, but so what?
And your absolutely wrong about not having enough memory. It takes miniSD cards and has 128 megs of RAM. Right now I have 2 1gig miniSD cards and a 128 meg SD card. Also you can buy up to 4gig MiniSD cards.
So frankly with miniSD slot your disk space is practically UNLIMITED.
For instance many possibilities:
* Go the 'Slax' route. Slax is a customizable Live Linux cdrom. It has various modules that you can use that you can add-on applications and other things to a already existing live cdrom. You can do this because the modules are compressed read-only file systems and you use UnionFS to mount them over the existing file system transparently. You can mix and match applications in that manner.
You can do the same thing with this. No problem.
So other possibilities.
* Remote X11 applications. Need I say more? (and yes NX compression will make them perfectly usable)
* Simple games.
* VoIP.
* remote access of systems through a veriaty of means such as voice command, terminal, tones.
* 266mhz CPU is fast enough for video.
* GPS kicks-ass. Interact with other GPS systems and keep track of things via GPSD and such.
* secure encrypted file systems for passwords and other sensitive information.
* stream audio
What this thing is is a Linux PC that fits in your pocket. Pretty much anything you can do with a PC linux box you can do with this thing.
This thing literally kicks the shit out of any sort of propriatory hardware phone you can think of. Even with out the camera. The possiblities are endless.
Sounds perfect :)
When is this ITSATRAP shit going to end?
...and it didn't seem to work:
... User unknown
From: Postmaster
To:
Reply-To:
Sender: Postmaster
Your message to home.com was rejected.
I said:
RCPT To:
And home.com responded with
550 5.1.1
But, for the record, this was indeed tagged 'itsnotatrap' before 'itsatrap'.
Your efforts at countering today's 'itsatrap' initiative, while numerically significant, aren't really helping.
Funny, maybe I'm old, but the only thing I was really worried about was whether or not it was a good phone.
Headphone socket aside, I've already got all that other stuff. Why would I want to pay more for one piece of hardware that will probably do all of them poorly?
It was about software, not hardware.
Doing one thing and doing it well is great you're talking about software, and you can have a million things on your computer. It's a bit less good when you need a pocket for each one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
glommed from the net...
Neo1973 Handset Hardware
The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.
Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said.
The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open.
Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands.
The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection.
Moss-Pultz notes that the FIC-GTA001, or Neo1973, is merely the first model in a planned family of open Linux phones from FIC. He expects a follow-up model to offer both WiFi and Bluetooth. "By the time one ships, the next one is half done," he says.
I second your sig.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Pretty much any 'phone made in the last five years is a good 'phone. There are some exceptions, but not many. Once you've got the 'good 'phone' part solved, the question is 'what can we do with all the spare CPU power we have on this machine?'
An address book is obvious; you need to store 'phone numbers anyway, so it's not much of a stretch to store the rest of the contact information. Add in IrDA or Bluetooth so you can trivially send vCards to other people and it's a useful feature. If someone asks for a friend or colleague's contact details you can hand them a virtual business card.
Since you need to sync the address book with a computer, you may as well sync calendar information as well. I have my 'phone with me more often than my computer and so being able to have calendar alarms on the 'phone instead of the computer is great.
A camera? I wasn't convinced by this one until I got a camera-phone. I hadn't owned a camera for quite a while and didn't see the point in getting one. But then I found out that having a camera that took reasonable (2 megapixel - not fantastic, but not bad) quality pictures in my pocket all the time meant I actually used it.
A media player would be useful for the times I don't want to carry my iPod, except that the included headphone have sharp corners which hurt my ears and Nokia insist on a proprietary headphone socket.
I can't remember what other features my 'phone has, but if they don't take up any UI space (and they don't, since I have a set of shortcuts to the features I actually use) then they don't bother me. Mass production brings the price down.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
According to the article it has a microSD slot.
Its also got bluetooth which should slightly offset the lack of a headphone socket (except for playing MP3's which you seem to be interested in).
While I'm not big on WiFi, it certainly would have made sense for this thing. A nice app to search for and alert if any open wireless is available, so you can kick off voip would definately underscore the power of an open platform.
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
itscrap
;-)
Oh great, another tag meme.
snarkd
You forgot at the end:
set_Destination(couch);
start_navigation();
}
Please help metamoderate.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Sure it might be open, but you think there'd be some way to get more than just GPRS on these kind of phones? It's not as if GPRS is the only game in town for data, there's certainly no credible reason why it's omitted on these phones
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Does anyone have a clue about the dimensions of the thing? I currently own an old Sony-Ericsson T100 and most modern phones are way bigger and heavier. If it isn't, it might actually be an interesting gadget, since I've been annoyed by a couple of design choices made for my phone - a non-issue for an open-source phone...
Would you pay 350$ to get a phone that can only call and receive calls, just because it runs linux?
I would rather just get a cheap candy bar nokia.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
A company proposes an open linux cellphone, and there aren't enough nerds left on slashdot to even fill a page with intelligent comments.
That's lame, my friend. Slashdot is bleeding it's best readers.
snarkd
FIC got lots of free advertising from Microsoft for that blurb.
Besides, you can recommend Windows XP and still be OSS friendly, despite what some idiots think. Some people actually need to use the best tool for the job.
The screen is far too small on a cell phone to play movies. Watching a full-length movie would be really painful. I might occassionally watch "guy gets hit by a pie on youtube" on my cell phone, but hardly more than that. And you don't need massive disk space to do that.
Proper quality headphones are bigger than the entire size of the cell phone. Having a headphone jack is therefore somewhat irrelevant. If I wanted an iPod, I'd buy that, and throw it in the duffel bag with my regular size headphones. What's that, you say? You use crappy lo-fi "ear buds" that let everyone else hear what you're listening to? Well, the built-in speaker should be fine for you.
As far as the camera feature goes... I already have a camera which is much, much better than any camera on a phone. I can see using the cell phone camera in emergency situations where you absolutely have to take a picture of something. But aside from that, it is pretty much useless.
Also, there is a memory card socket FYI.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
First of all, the Carriers have little choice here. Fully functional Reference kits are available in the under $1000 range. For GSM, you can get them for about $200-300. These are the kits that companies who build cell-phones use to jumpstart their designs. So what's a Carrier going to do? Outlaw these? And kill development for cell-phones? I don't think so.
The most they might do is to tighten down on the registration. But that involves overhead and hassle. Unless these kits prove to be an issue, it's not going to happen; at least not with the GSM market. And not worldwide.
You are also wrong about the "time wasters" who supply low volume and low profit phones. What the Carriers want (at least some of them) is to sell the airtime. Some of these Carriers really don't care where it goes, as long as they get paid for it.
There's a whole resale market here which underscores the point. You want to to become your own cell-phone company? You can, if you have the money. And if you don't think *those* resellers are hungry, you're kidding yourself.
I admit that as far as the standard view about "time wasters" goes (for the big companies) you are correct. And it's explicitly been this attitude which has severely hindered innovation in the cell-phone market. There are a plethora of uses for small markets. Some of the hungrier carriers fully realize this, and are supportive of anything which will make them money.
Finally, the lockdown on GSM transceivers is a bit silly. The interface is extremely simple; it's a variation of the old Hayes Modem interface. I kid you not. "ATDT....". There's even an Open Source Project for this. Here's the link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libgsmc
Finally, there's even a group dedicated to a fully Open Source phone. Namely, the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. They are having a meeting tomorrow night in San Francisco. Here's a link to their mailing list archives:
http://telefono.revejo.org/pipermail/svhmpc_telefo no.revejo.org/
Check out the list, and the information on various associated websites. There's really a groundswell building in this area. And those Carriers which close things off are going to miss an opportunity that their competitors are actively interested in.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I am curious just how bright the screen might be... I used a small lens to project my GP2X screen (3.5") onto the back of a bus seat with an approx 11" diagonal viewing area and it still had better contrast than I (an admitted non-videophile) need. I would love to try the same with this little gadget.
"only call and recieve calls"? wtf? what else do you want a phone to do, phone-wise? for everything else, you have the linux. play games, run office applications, watch movies, surf the web (assuming some sort of networking is available).
the only other hardware you might see in a phone these days is a camera, and i can damn well do without that.
Me, too.
-TheJorge
Bluetooth. Just sync up a ear danglers for headphone+mic. Sync up stereo headphones for mp3 playing, sync up any bluetooth camera.
Id likely get one or two.
Draco
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Your overly suspicious girlfriend installed tracking software on your phone and remotely polled your locations while you were gone with her phone. Hence her automated reply to your message read: "Re: Hi honey!" "Don't bother. Since you were visiting that bitch Laura again I switched the locks. We're though."
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
It seems to me that trolls are becoming the new Slashdotters.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
This is hilarious. The original post contains three facts, one of which is simply wrong (there is a memory card socket) one of which is irrelevant (no headphone jack, but it supports bluetooth headsets, which are better) along with one assertion (not enough memory to be an mp3 or video player) which is either a conclusion based on the wrong fact or a ridiculous assertion that 128MB is too small to fit a player into.
So basically, the post contains 75% misinformation, and the information it does contain is painfully obvious.
And it's still +5 insightful.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
This will never be available in the United States.
Purchase of it and use of it on U.S. GM networks will be punishable by death.
(I'm only half kidding)
+++ATH0
It can do ANYTHING, because it runs Linux. It's GSM so it can send and receive text messages like anything else. It can do web browsing, IRC, VOIP, whatever else you want, because it runs Linux.
What else are you looking for? What can your "cheap candy bar Nokia" do that this can't?
The reason this will be outlawed by cell phone carriers is precisely because it can do anything... because it runs Linux. Anything that loosens their ironclad control over handsets is verboten.
+++ATH0
Looks great, has touchscreen, memorycard-slot, GPS, and even runs linux. If it only had a camera and a headphone-socket (is it really missing such a socket? I find that quite hard to believe), this would be the perfect phone I was always waiting for!
Does it have Wifi? I think Wifi is really important, because while at a hotspot, like in your home, you could route your voice calls over VoIP. That would make it so much cheaper, and could be a killer app for Joe Average. I really think we ought to do this.
That said, I'll stand in line to get one of these, if the hardware is a bit rough. I'm sick and tired of my Sony Ericsson K700i, I've had it less than a year, and it is just totally borked allready. It is important that a phone can take a bit of beating.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
According to this the phone will accept MicroSD cards, also lets not forget it has bluetooth, so you could use a bluetooth stereo headset if you're so inclined. I'm tempted by the GPS myself.
Can someone pls explain what above poster meant by:
> GPS kicks-ass. Interact with other GPS systems and keep track of things via GPSD and such.
what's the point of GPSD? I know its a deamon that allows multiple GPS receivers to send GPS data but what is the point of that, why do you care where the device is.
wikipedia article doesn't explain why you'd want to use it
thx,
Ash.
Imagine encrypted SMS ?
Or encrypted voice conversations?
Imagine mapping/pinpointing locations and using the GPS to show your place, and have a map with bookmarked locations, to find a certain store on a certain street so you don't have to walk around lost not knowing where is what.
So Andy... what is the SD slot for?
How about this: no headphone socket and no camera.
I have a iPod and DSLR this doesn't sound like a problem to me.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Does it run Linux?
Can it be reflashed? TFA does not mention it. Will the firmware for the baseband and the AGPS be provided along with code?
How many good silent movies have been released lately?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
What I meant was, you probably wouldn't want to have to either hold the phone to your head or force everyone else to listen to your movie.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Pretty much any 'phone made in the last five years is a good 'phone.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Ok, so the actual _phone_ bit may be ok, but the software needed to use it tends to be crap. For example, the bluetooth stack on my P900 is unstable as hell and not infrequently brings down the entire OS (or worse: it sometimes only becomes apparant that the stack has broken after you've picked up the call with your bluetooth headset). When the OS crashes you have to pull the battery out and powercycle the damn thing, then wait while it reboots and logs back into the GSM network. Infact, the whole OS tends to be pretty unstable and it's not uncommon for me to have to powercycle it even when not using bluetooth.
Infact, I haven't seen a truely stable phone since my Nokia 5130. The phone I got after the 5130 was a 7110 and that was also unstable. My UTStarcom F1000G (802.11g SIP phone, about 6 months old) is also bugridden and frequently decides it can't see the network and needs a powercycle. Generally there seems to be no recognised way of reporting bugs and when you _do_ report a bug it's usually ignored by the manufacturer (for example, I reported several bugs to UTStarcom - some of them more than once. When their last firmware release was made it stated that there were "no known bugs" but they had completely failed to fix any of the bugs I had reported...).
The problem seems to be that the life of the device is too short - it's rushed to market with unstable software to begin with, then they only sell it for a year or two and they won't release any software updates after they stop selling them so the software never stablises. The software running on the current generation of PDAs/Smartphones seems to be of lower quality then Windows 3.0 software.
I'm hoping that a open phone will do 4 things:
1. Make a platform standard so that older software can be used on newer phones. This means that software can undergo a long development cycle over several generations of phone instead of only working on one specific model which is only available for a short time.
2. Produce higher quality software through open development. FOSS software is frequently higher quality than closed software, and if I find a bug then at least I can fix it instead of just having to live with the problem.
3. Get us out of the Windows-style shareware scene. Coming from a Linux background where useful software is freely available, it's quite painful for me when I find that the phone is missing some little feature that _should_ be integral, and then finding that someone wants to charge me £35 to register their crappy little utility that works around the problem.
4. Make the development environment more standard. The current generation of devices seem to need propriatory SDKs in order to develop any software. Frequently they are Windows only - no good to me at all. I just want to be able to install the libs and cross-compiler on my Linux workstation and be able to compile a project by typing "make". And being able to look at the code of the things I'm linking to is invaluable when the documentation (inevitably) proves to be useless.
A camera? I wasn't convinced by this one until I got a camera-phone. I hadn't owned a camera for quite a while and didn't see the point in getting one.
I've got a camera phone - the lens is crap at the best of times and it gets covered in fluff while it's in my pocket. The result is that it never gets used coz the photos are terrible. Yeah, ok, so I guess it might be useful if I have a car accident or something since I'd be able to take some (crappy) photos of the scene for the insurance company, but that's about it.
A media player would be useful for the times I don't want to carry my iPod
I find that when I use my phone as a media player the end result is simply that I have no battery left when I actually want to make a call. Suckage. That and the fact that there's nowhere near enough memory to store my whole music collection and I'm buggered if I'm going to sit there working out what I want to listen to before I leave home.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Belongs to Symbian! But yeah I'm all in for competition, however I don't think Linux or Windows can beat Symbian in this area.
The Motorola A780 (about 2 years old) has integrated GPS and runs the Linux Kernel and a heavy Linux filesystem. Its got the camera/mp3 player/GPRS-EDGE/320x240 color screen/Blue Tooth/microSD slot/USB blah blah blah... Its really cool. I finally got one, but only the European version has the integrated GPS. So I had to order it through ebay.co.uk and find someone willing to ship to the US. It even came with CoPilot preinstalled so you can really use the GPS functionality.
Why it isn't for sale in the US is beyond me, but I'm sure there is some Motorola/Microsoft politics going on. There's a community of Linux activists hacking the phone and Motorola offers the source downloadable from their website. In short this product exists and works well.
This recent announcement looks like vapor hardware. All the 'pictures' are CAD renderings. If you want it now, you can get it now. Though, unless you're in Europe, expect to work hard to get it.
What do you mean, lack of headphones? a2dp over Bluetooth 2.0, baby. I bought a set of Motorola HT-820 headphones for $50. They can connect to an audio source AND work with a cell phone simultaneously (they send a 'pause' command to the music player, and/or mute the audio if it's not pausable,) play the ring tone, and you pick up by pressing the button on the side. When you hang up the call, the music resumes.
The only complaint I have with them is they inject a slight digital delay into the audio path, which makes them poorly suited for watching television. (Oh, that and the stupid glowing blue lights. WTF is up with that?) Otherwise, they work really well. Battery life is pretty good, and Motorola now equips all their rechargeable consumer goods with a nice standard mini-USB jack-based charger.
John
And one of the great things about this phone is that it could even be tweaked to play Ogg Vorbis. Yessss, hopefully my search is finally over.
This is what openness is about. Nevermind all the phones/gadgets/whatever which is called Linux devices just because they use the kernel. If I can't modify it to do the things I want, I could just as well buy yet another Nokia.
Another phone that looks interesting is the ROAD PC phone, but at the moment it's only vaporware.
Yes, vendors will try to lock you in, but when they can't, they'd rather have your business than not.
For example, I have a Treo 650. I could have gotten the newer Treo 700, but that only comes in Sprint and Verizon models, requiring that I choose which vendor into which I lock myself. The 650, on the other hand, has a "generic" version where I can choose my own vendor, so I chose T-mobile.
Now, T-mobile generally doesn't sell Treos. If you go to a T-mobile store and ask for one, they'll ask you to get a Windows-powered device, or at best Blackberry. But here I am with a Palm Treo, so, do they want my business? I asked them, and of course they said yes.
I am happily using my Treo, with the fairly inexpensive (+US$30) Unlimited Internet connection feature. Not only is it convenient to use the built-in browser to Google for nearby stores when I am travelling (Google: "barnes & noble [enter local zip code]"), but I can use Bluetooth dialup to connect my laptop to the Internet while I'm riding in the car, and never have to worry about finding a Wifi hotspot again.
If the makers of OpenMoko market the phone independently, I expect it to have appeal with Linux hackers at first. As the community develops and applications appear, it would have expanding appeal to borderline geeks, and then eventually to the population at large, although taking only a miniscule segment of the market. It would be similar to the Linksys WRT-54GL router, the improvements of which allow savvy IT staff to use it for their SOHO needs over a more expensive router.
What would be lacking would be the backing and marketing clout from a mainstream provider. Sure, they could sell a locked version to Verizon, who might promote the phones at their stores or sell at a subsidy, but then someone would crack it, and then we'd have cheap OpenMoki subsidized by Verizon being used on Cingular networks, or something like that.
Instead, perhaps the makers could partner with --oh, I don't know, some electronics retailers such as Best Buy, or computer makers such as Dell, to include the OpenMoko in some package. I haven't thought this through yet. But if they can get it out, then I'm sure the carriers would be happy to do business with them.
(Off-topic: one of the reasons I chose T-mobile over Verizon is that Verizon doesn't do GSM phones or SIM cards. How does Verizon expect their phones to work overseas if they don't use GSM? Or is it just that Verizon users never go anywhere?)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Even worse. According to their blog, it contains a headphone socket too.
All those naysayers really p*** me off. After years of longing finally an nearly 100% opensource phone, with a proven build-system (openembedded) and backed by a development team which has some of the brightest hackers in the mobile linux world including Mr. GPL (Harald Welte, from gpl violations). And what do we get? A bunch of postings from naysayers, who didn't read the article, didn't do two seconds of their own research (like checking who is in this team) and distribute plain wrong facts.
As soon as this thing is available, my Motorola A780 (which is Linux, but badly badly crippled) will be for sale on ebay.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Actually, I did read the article, and nowhere does it say there is a headphone socket, and nowhere in the pictures does it show one. I have never heard of "microSD", so I had no idea that was a memory slot... it's certainly not a slot I can put any of my existing memory sticks in.
Blame the journalist for writing a bad article, not me for reading it. Yes my post was flawed, and it didn't deserve the +5 it was modded up to because I missed the memory slot, but my fundamental point, that this phone looks horribly under-specced to me, stands.
I'm choosing my next free upgrade soon... I can get a 3.2 mexapixel cameraphone or an 4Gb mp3/video player phone, so I'm not going to hold out for a 128Mb no-camera phone.
If I was a naysayer, I'd have probably pointed out that this phone was vapourware and that GPS is useless for in-car navigation without an up-to date open-source roadmap, which doesn't exist, and wouldn't fit in the memory even if it did.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a