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

Re:Android is what you want

[AltairDusk]

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.

Nokia N900

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Yer boned...

[slinches]

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.

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.