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The Death of the Greenphone
phobos13013 writes "Trolltech announced this week that they will discontinue development on their Greenphone platform. The Greenphone was advertised to be the first phone with a user-modifiable environment. Trolltech CTO Benoit Schilling stated that they are not really a hardware company and so will focus their efforts on FIC's Neo 1973, now available. However, Schilling hinted at a future Wi-Fi-enabled endeavor (possibly a VOIP phone)."
Trolltech is the creator of the QT toolkit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit)
Which is what KDE uses.
This was never true, and is even less so now: http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/myth/60
If by 'play with it' you mean play with the interface, then you can install OpenMoko on all sorts of phones and PDAs to try it out. Just yesterday I installed it on my Palm T|X. If you don't have a compatible touch-screen PDA, you can always virtualize it on your desktop using something like QEMU:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMoko_under_QEMU
The link to the press release on the KDE myths page is broken, so here is an alternate one:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050524172943589
It's sold out because it was very probably only made in a very small edition. It's intention from beginning to end was to be a development platform, not an actual product. With the Neo1973/OpenMoko, people opening up iPhones and similar stuff, Trolltech seems to regard the chain reaction they intended to start as either started or unstartable (my money's on the former). No reason to go on, let the actual hardware guys handle it.
is this thing available? The website says that I (the consumer) should come back in October. I guess I will check again in 5 days
but it is not looking good. My contract is up soon so I might not mind trying Neo but they sure don't look ready for business.
Current estimates suggests the Neo1973 GTA02v4 (the production version) will be shipping at the end of December. But I think all bets are off as to whether the software will be of "production quality" by then (whatever "production quality" means these days - every production phone I've owned in the past 5 years has been an unstable piece of crap anyway).
I understand that you can run Qtopia on the devices though, which is a bit more usable as a phone than OpenMoko at the moment, but from what I've read there are serious battery-life problems when running Qtopia.
http://blog.nexusuk.org