Canadian Firms Get Behind OpenMoko/FreeRunner

mario writes "Now that the OpenMoko platform has stabilized enough to provide the OM2008 image (supporting the three major toolkits), things are starting to heat up. Linuxdevices is reporting on the start of a port of Devicescape's connect application. Koolu (another Canadian company) is also doing development for its W.E. phone (a branded FreeRunner). Which leads me to ask: Where are the American companies?"

Comments

"Where are the American companies?"

[dattaway]

Investing their money in Washington crafting laws and developing new business models.

Love the concept but too bad about the Glamo gpu

[NocturnHimtatagon]

This is mainly from the viewpoint of a graphics programmer (3d, gpu drivers, ...), so my comments will focus on that part. I know there are a lot good features on this devices.

The Glamo chip can only use textures of 512 x 512 so it's impossible to use hw acceleration to decompress full screen video (unless you stretch the texture to the entire screen).

The video bus bandwidth is 7m/s which gives a theoretical maximum of 12 fps without hw acceleration. That bus is also shared with the sd card reducing the bandwidth even further if you are accessing the sd card.

SMedia refuses to give out the documentation of their gpu and only employees of OpenMoko have access to that documentation. Implementing 3D for the glamo is low priority. It's obvious it's low priority but it's a shame there's a gpu in there but you can't use it or even improve the driver.

They're blocking it right now.

[StarKruzr]

Carriers are exerting pressure on baseband manufacturers to ensure that they do not open specifications required to get open-source software to work with advanced basebands that work with EDGE, EvDO, or HS*PA. So all you get is plain GPRS and voice, on the one baseband that was available to be used with the FreeRunner.

Don't expect this to change anytime soon. It won't. If necessary, the carriers will exert pressure on Congress to pass a law banning open source operating systems on cellular devices in the name of "security."