Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenMoko's FreeRunner Rises From the Ashes

Posted by timothy on from the yews-uh-spelt-czech-her dept.

ChristW writes "Remember OpenMoko's first free and open source phones, the GTA-01 and GTA-02 (also called FreeRunner)? There is a new project called Phoenux. The German company Golden Delicous is building a new main board (called GTA-04) for the GTA01/02 case. The new hardware features a DM3730 (800 MHz) processor, a GTM601W UMTS (HSPA) module, and lots more." Would you pay extra for a phone that comes with a Debian build?

1 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. it's called the n900 by Superken7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On top of running debian and being fully open source (well, maybe not the hardware and all the firmware) it seemed fully functional and had great hardware. I still preferred Android because in spite of being less open, it allowed for easier development and I found it more exciting.

    It's a shame maemo (or whatever they call it these days) is not going to take off, because it actually looked pretty good, had very good performance, and was very hacker-friendly. Really sad :(

    OpenMoko has the flaw (and benefit) of being fully open source to the hardware. Thing is, if they are not going to produce millions, cost is going to be very high. Maybe if they focused on porting maemo and did sell millions.. but I'm not sure millions of people would see the benefit of running open source hardware, for the same reason most don't care if the software is free or proprietary. I think nokia with the n900 and Android with the nexus phones have done a great job of providing a nice trade-off between openness, usability, and popularity (who would have thought the year of the linux smartphone was so nigh! ;) )