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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 still throws me off and makes me think its fake, but the Greenphone did sound really neat.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Really, look at the demographics. Who buys all those pink iPods? Teen girls. The kind of people that spend all day talking and texting on their phone. Who gets a hard on over linux? Introverted geeks. The kind of people that want pizza delivery robots so they can avoid all human contact.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It would appear that they'e sold out of phones.
And yet they're quitting development?
DOES NOT COMPUTE!
They'll be back, I think, with something else. There's plenty of reasons for a corporate entity to want to provide customized phones to its employees, or to give them out as a promotion, or stuff like that.
It's too cool a gadget idea to throw away.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
It's a bummer in several ways. First, we geeks don't get hard-ons for crappy hardware (as the poster below suggests). Sleek advanced hardware, totally open for us to explore while trying to change the world, however, gets my blood going. When the hackers cracked the iPhone and put some of the best software management tools I've seen in place, without even a damned header file... that was cool.
:-) but what the hell?
I own an NEO1973. I'm glad to support the project, and desperately hope that it will succeed. Here's something I read today from the OpenMoko mail list: "The Neo is, was, and will be, a product for geeks and therefore never was intended to be a mass market product. Geeks do not look at fancy glamour but for useful attributes." I have no idea who this guys is talking about. I'm about the biggest geek I've ever met (yeah, I know some of you are bigger
The NEO1973 battery is tiny, screen too small, touch capabilities poor, integration level low, plastic instead of anodized aluminum, and worst of all... there's not the same kind of inspired software leadership. The community wants to build the world's best phone, but a guy like Linus is required to lead the effort. I think the OpenMoko guys have incredible vision, but not the complete vision, and the leader needed make it succeed is currently missing. Get the right guy involved, and they could change the world... crappy hardware and all.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
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!
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
I thought apples iPhone was insane at $500, and this thing is/was $200 more than that? No wonder it was a failure.
The $300 neo 1973 replacement is still a bit steep for me, but at least it's in the ballpark.
AccountKiller
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.
Why does no one understand that the Greenphone was purely a developer platform?
It was never meant for consumers, and the fact that it works as a phone is purely secondary to its main function of providing a test bed for developing mobile phone applications for Trolltech's platform. Comparing it to consumer, mass market phones doesn't make any sense.
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
Assuming we all had Neos with mobile broadband access and TrixBoxes(Asterisk) running at home what would the future look like? Open Source VOIP? Would we have something like email addresses instead of phone numbers? FYI, my biggest IT coup was installing asterisk at work and having it email everybody voice messages as email attachments. Best bang for your buck if you're about to ask for a raise.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight
I think you still don't understand. Developer platform doesn't mean "phone marketed towards the developer/geek market" it means "device that developers use to test their software on". It's really only that, and the lack of EDGE is not really an issue (unless the network speed is crucial to your testing).
Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux
Trolltech is hugely supportive of Linux (sponsoring developers to work on X, KDE, and freedesktop.org projects like harfbuzz), and the Greenphone wasn't a failure so finding a scapegoat isn't necessary.
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 only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data.
Errm, I might.
I mean, of course I want UMTS, but at the moment there are no open platforms that support it - the Neo1973 is GPRS and GSM only and I'm seriously considering getting one. To be blunt, I'm sick of crappy closed devices that aren't developer friendly (and in the case of my Symbian UIQ phone and VxWorks phone, totally unstable even when you're using them for what they were _designed_ to do).
To me, having a decent speed connection is secondary to actually being able to do useful stuff on the phone, which the current closed platforms do not let me do.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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
I think you don't need to say *NIX anymore. OS X Leopard 10.5 is certified UNIX, and as the iPhone is based on OSX, isn't the iPhone the first UNIX phone?
even if we have to fight Steve Jobs tooth and nail for it.I thought Apple is going to open up the platform for developers.
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I also have a neo1973, and am thoroughly enjoying the geek factor - just this week I got it an Apple wireless keyboard for it, set up and running, and I have to tell you all that there is nothing quite so fun as sitting somewhere, hacking code on my phone, using the phone itself. Python+neo1973+apple bt keyboard == the coolest godamn bit of hardware in the room, and I've got tons of stuff in here .. from BeBox to SGI to Access Music to .. well, lots of stuff.
..
.. OpenMoko will move onto whatever hardware it can support, and it will move rapidly. Its already being planned for a number of other devices in the near future - not just phones, but such things as synthesizers, musical gear, etc. In that capacity, it looks to fair pretty well .. all the tools are there in the base OS to give developers a real boot in the ass and make something nice for their end user.
..
And yes, there is hardware in front of me that had a *lot* of potential. The BeBox, for example. The BeBox and the NEO1973 have a fairly decent set of common traits; both started out as exciting hardware platforms from excited engineers who "thought of all the potential, but never implemented any of it"
The difference with the neo1973 and openmoko in general is that the BeBox lesson has been learned, and learned well
But the thing to keep in mind in all of this is: the *hardware* *has* *to* *be* *there* *first*. OpenMoko is just a software platform. If it gains traction, watch as numerous other hardware vendors come along, take the risks, and reap all the rewards of not having to bootstrap a software environment for their users from scratch
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The OpenMoko software is more important than the hardware. The Neo1973 is open hardware designed to a specification, but won't ever be a successful commercial product because no phone company is going to subsidise it. There is a bullet to be bitten, that there are few smartphone platforms that are open enough to match the aspirations of OpenMoko, but I can see it being ported to other smartphone chipsets such as those used by HTC or indeed non-dedicated chipsets like the OpenSparc S1. It wouldn't surprise me at all if was running on an iPhone in the next year either. That's where the software's strength will lie: while phones are not PCs, and are probably harder to develop drivers for (one of the reasons, I believe, why the Nokia N8x0 doesn't have a phone module), there will be a group of people who want to get it out there and onto as many phones as they can.
The Neo runs X11 on a 640x480 screen and allows multiple toolkits to run on the same screen. If TrollTech wants to run in that environment, that's good.
On the other hand, if they are going to port Qt/Embedded and try to take over the phone, like they have done on other phones, they should forget it; those attempts at monopolizing the platform are unwelcome.
Overall, I'm kind of doubtful that TrollTech has much to contribute anyway. Devices based on Qt/Embedded have had lackluster commercial success, and the platform has serious usability problems in my opinion. Maybe the company should stick to writing toolkits and leave the end user experience to people who have more experience with that.