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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?"
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.
This sig no verb.
http://syncevolution.org/ Looks fairly promising using your current setup. A brief look give the assumption it's compatible with evolution, and will connect up to anything that talks syncml, and there's a syncml client for nearly any smartphone out there. And some dated info found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=398113 gives info on someone setting up evolution to talk activesync, which would allow for windows-based phones to sync up...
I sync Evolution with a Samsung Epix running Windows Mobile 6.5. Works fine, at least with the USB cable - I haven't tried Bluetooth.
I'm running Debian Squeeze.
--saint
It won't do it out of the box, but as an open platform it should be possible to make it happen. Might require an a custom OS patch though... As an Android developer myself, I might look into this and release something if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
The Bolachek Journals
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.
It's basically a Debian box with phone functionality.
Add blue tooth keyboard & mouse, plug the video out into a decent monitor and I'm not even sure you need a desktop or laptop.
Deleted
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.
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.
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.
Omeg La. Rofl Leh.
Most of the mobile world I know of is slowly moving away from direct synchronisation with the desktop. Instead, the desktop and the mobile device sync with the mail/groupware server.
I suggest taking a look at Zimbra as it supports most devices out there. You can go at it both ways too, with either a server sync or a desktop sync.
We are using Exchange right now with the Evolution MAPI conduit. We are moving away from this solution in favor of Zimbra which will work across desktop and mobile platforms.
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.
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...
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 )
That would be a little overkill for 2 users, but it is a good point. I agree with your last statement completely. We acquired a company admin'd by a Linux-obsessed freak, and the people we hired on were quite happy about not having to send the occasional un-openable MS Office doc to the one person with Office to re-save and convert for OO.o use, and how well Exchange handled their email than Zimbra, etc. His over-adamant use of OSS was a hindrance on the business. As a sysadmin, you first obligation is to your employer, not your principles.
Of course, we're both going to get voted down because we are a bunch of MS sellouts, despite a full third of my servers/appliances running Linux and other OSS...
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The N900 is great. I'd be very careful recommending it to a Windows/Mac user without Linux experience, but if they are technically competent they should be able to get it working fine. The main problem is that, like so many recent Nokia products, it seems to lack the last two months of beta testing polish which makes the real difference. However, if you already know Linux you can really benefit from it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If you have ethics and security issues with storing data in the cloud, then shouldn't you also be looking for a device or application that encrypts sensitive data?
Do any Android phones do encryption natively? I've heard that the upcoming Droid Pro claims to. I know the iPhone has encryption support, but I don't know how whether it encrypts all application data or only data that Apple deems 'sensitive'.
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.
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/
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.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Correct. I jut bought a new LG Android phone and had no trouble upgrading the custom 2.1 Android OS that it came with to stock google 2.2. If that had not worked, I would have immediately returned the phone as 'defective'.
The Bolachek Journals
It's likely a firewalling issue. I used to work at a web hosting company that mostly used Courier on shared/dedicated/and vps machines, although a few (like my personal vps) ran Dovecot. It was necessary to tweak the firewall rules on a few of the shared machines to get BlackBerry phones to work with their push-pop mail. Not having an Android phone, I don't know if they support push pop from a secondary location like BB does, or not. However, I don't think that the issue is Courier itself, assuming all your authdaemon settings are correct.
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.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I don't mean to be rude, but this was in fact, Nokia's strategy. The N900 can sync with evolution because all the good software for it is open-source.
In the new release of the firmware, even the stock N900 comes with the maemo.org production repository already activated - so, even the stock N900 has a whole bunch of working applications - open source.
The strategy with Meego is that even when the N900 is defunct the reason will be something better is there to fill its place, even if it isn't made by Nokia - they'd be mad not to continue with its niche success.
The n900 has syncevolution, that can supposedly sync with lots of stuff: http://syncevolution.org/documentation/compatibility
However, I'm not sure how reliable it is on the n900 at the moment.
I've been using syncevolution on the N900 for over six months now, and it's been working like charm, no problems whatsoever.