Open Source-Friendly Smartphones For the Small Office?

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?"

Comments

Nokia n900 with Maemo?

[Culture20]

If you're already using debian-based products, why not use Maemo for the phones and apt-get debian-ARM .debs? Even if regular syncing doesn't work, you could automate an rsync over SSH with passwordless pke.

Re:Android is what you want

[NekoIncardine]

To be a hint more accurate...

The reason Android can be relied upon to play nice, is that, as the only one of the platforms with open code access, you can write the app you need to get it to sync correctly with Evolution - or worst case, convert your Evolution files to what the Android's syncing functionality uses. Either of these solutions, which are not currently possible on a majority of other mass-market smartphones, should work to fit your needs - possibly with the hiring of a handy coder or two or paying someone to write it for the Evolution project.

The other nice part about Android is that there's a fair array of sets - great way for the boss to show off his boss-ness by getting a recent top-of-the-line while your group handles (surprisingly cheap for a smartphone!) sets from last year, WITHOUT losing compatibility with the key app you need.

I believe that Blackberries can also support custom apps, though if your business does FOSS for the sake of Freedom, as opposed to simply cost, the Android OS, being GNU GPL (even if the specific implementation in many phones isn't), may better suit your wishes anyhow.

Re:Android is what you want

[martyw]

Quite contrary to the public's belief. Android is not very friendly to standard open source projects, to usual OSS programming languages and lacks basic development means in general. Of course you can "publish" nearly anything on the store, but that anything must come from one development scenario only - the Java app.

One can't even use even basic canonical open source projects and libraries.

Developers are pretty much forced to use Java everywhere - language that is not very popular in the FOSS community and that is falling further down in popularity every other day now.

Re:Windows/Exchange - What?

[ratboy666]

Really, I must ask... What part of "the two computers use Evolution" did you not understand?
What part of "two computers" did you not understand?

Now, what phone are you recommending?

There was no complaint about services, costs, or anything remotely resembling a question about installing MS SBS.

But, since you brought it up -- a copy of MS SBS costs $1,089 (http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/pricing.aspx?pf=true) -- and something for taxes. And, of course, a computer to run it on, installation and training... call it $2000 (I'd go higher, but, hey, MS people are fairly inexpensive - normally, I'd figure $100/hour for installation and training, and a $600 + taxes for the server, $2000 combined, and a services budget of 10 hours so $3000 total. Feel free to quote less).

But wait! He still has to buy the smartphones! Doesn't save one single sou.

But wait! For this ABSOLUTELY RETARDED answer (because you didn't answer the question at all), you get a +5 moderation.

So there is more than one idiot involved.

Like I said in another post, I use a Blackberry (I get the one with the biggest keyboard), and I sync to Evolution with multisync.