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Open Source-Friendly Smartphones For the Small Office?

Posted by timothy on from the ethics-schmethics dept.

Thunderstruck writes "I work in a small office with just two computers. Both machines run long-term-service releases of Ubuntu, with Gnome, and Evolution for scheduling, contact management and electronic mail. We plan to stick with Linux long-term. For telephone service, we're using smartphones. In order to keep everything straight, we need phones that can synchronize easily with the calendars and contact data on each owner's desktop machine. We cannot use cloud based services for this function due to ethics rules, and for security reasons. Right now, we do all of this with older Palm phones, but these are a dying breed. What options are out there right now for phones that will sync with Evolution (or another good Linux PIM suite) which do not require data to go through the cloud first?"

7 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Don't think phones, think software by dacarr · · Score: 4, Informative
    On the phone side, the only phones that are pretty much open-source friendly are anything running Android and OpenMoko. I know Android won't sync to the desktop in its native state, though - and OpenMoko...dunno, ask others.

    Consider, though, the following.

    Android, in its current state, can talk to an Exchange server. If you have an option that will do this (Evo server, maybe?), use it.

    Blackberry and Windows Mobile are both syncable on Linux in general. Do searches in the Ubuntu package manager.

    Nokia Symbian, I believe, will function similarly.

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  2. Re:Android is what you want by AltairDusk · · Score: 5, Informative

    As much as I like Android the most open source friendly current smartphone I know of is the Nokia N900. I would poke around some of the N900 focused forums, they may already be capable of what you're looking for and if not someone may have figured out how to add it already.

  3. Zimbra Collaboration Suite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I recommend using Zimbra. It's free, is an excellent mail server similar in functionality to Exchange, and will easily install on either Debian 5.0 or any version of Ubuntu. You can use any mail client, and they even have their own client, as well as a feature-rich ajax-based web client. I sync it to my Android phone via MAPI, and it works very seamlessly.

  4. Re:Ethics? by PhilHibbs · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you have employee information in your phone contacts, you are bound (in the UK) by the Data Protection Act to protect that data. If it's being sent to some cloudy server that might be hosted in a foreign country, then you are breaking the law.

  5. Re:Android is what you want by rwa2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to mention that the N900 has a PalmOS Garnet emulator available, so you might still be able to run some of your other legacy palm apps:
    http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/index.html

    I myself recently made the move from a Palm TX to an Android phone (purely because I'm a Google Maps Mobile addict), but still find myself carrying the Palm TX around for a lot of legacy apps that I haven't been able to find "modern" equivalents for...

    • DB
    • Progect (haven't found a better user-sortable outlining / project tracking tool anywhere else, even on PCs)
    • Cryptopad / KeyRing (though I guess I should try to migrate to the KeePass compatible thing eventually)
    • DiddleBug (haven't found any decent drawing apps for Android period, much less ones targeted for free-form note-taking)
    • HandyShopper (very useful for recurring lists, birthday party invitation lists, it even does a great job tallying my monthly budget!)
    • HappyDays (anniversary reminder linked to "birthday" field in address book, curiously good for popping up reminders for annual maintenance)
    • PIM entry is still much more streamlined than in Android 2.2 (too many submenus)
    • HP48GX emulator (some Android scientific / graphic calcs are close, but not really feature complete yet)
    • Plucker (still looking for some sort of automated web scraper for Android that allows offline viewing... I know Dolphin browser can sort of save individual pages, but it would be nice to carry complete sites around... Waiting for FBReaderJ to support the plkr format someday.)

    Anyway, I too am quite interested in where all the hardcore Palm users have migrated to (evidently it wasn't WebOS, if only for the lack of SD storage :P )

  6. SyncEvolution by ackbar · · Score: 4, Informative

    I use SyncEvolution with my Nokia E71. Works flawlessly. Will also work with the Nokia N900 and I'm guessing any Symbian S60 phone. http://syncevolution.org/

  7. Re:Yer boned... by slinches · · Score: 5, Informative

    While it's true that Nokia isn't providing much support for the N900, it shouldn't require much "hacking" to get a working sync solution because it's already been done. The Maemo community has really impressed me with their ability to provide functionality well beyond what's available on a stock N900.

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