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)."

Comments

Geek-friendly

[cynicsreport]

It is a common misconception that these phones can't be economically feasible because only a small number of 'geeks' will use them. Yes, I would like a 'geek-friendly' phone, but more importantly, I want a 'developer-friendly' phone. One with a nice API to access bluetooth and wifi capabilities.
When that happens, the general non-geek population benefits due to the availability of quality software that will run on the phone.

So, step 1: make the phone easy to use
Step 2: make the phone customizable
Step 3: make the phone developer-friendly
Step 4: let me use the same API for different phones; I'm sick of recoding half of my program to make it compatible with a different phone!

Re:Unfortunately, you're right

[pherthyl]

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did.

The Greenphone didn't fail, because it was never meant to be anything but a development platform to fill the void while there was nothing else good out there. Now that there are other open phones, its job is done. Aside from the sensationalized headline, this really isn't news at all.

Re:Unfortunately, you're right

[Simon Brooke]

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.

1. If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
2. OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
3. When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.

I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.

You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.

Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.