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Golden Delicious Now Shipping Hackable Openmoko GTA04
An anonymous reader writes with an update to the updated Openmoko phone that's long been in the works. From the story at Linux For Devices: "German manufacturer Golden Delicious has begun shipping a hackable open source smartphone that runs a variety of Linux software, including a newly optimized Openmoko distro. The Openmoko GTA04 is available as a finished phone or as a board that slips into earlier Openmoko Neo Freerunner GTA01 and GTA02 cases, providing an 800MHz Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a full range of sensors and wireless features." It's rather expensive for a mid-range Android phone, but far more interesting than fairly ordinary phones decked out with bling.
wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GTA04
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That's like devilishly expensive. If I had the extra money, I'd pay it, but dang!
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I reworked the original Openmoko CAD files, to be 3D-printable. Checkout my work here: http://blog.slyon.de/3d-printed-gta04-case/
....Golden Delicious is a variety of apple. Maybe GD should have marketed the phone under their own name! ;~)
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
The screen seems kind of small for a Smart Phone, and the case is definitely ugly-ass... Couldn't they have made the case a bit more, er, cool? Or did they have to design it that way to avoid Apple design patents?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I was happy enough with my N800, but the N810 and N900 spoiled me, so now my N9 sucks. If this had a keyboard, I'd have already signed up.
Still, I wonder if it can be conjoined with one of those bluetooth strap-on keyboards for iPhones...
Golden Delicious .. GOLDEN DELICIOUS.. a German company? I see the Japanese culture bomb has been dropped good and proper! Maybe the name sounds tougher in German ;)
So it costs a bit less than my Galaxy S2 and is way uglier.. pass. Though I'm sure a lot of hardware & software hackers will have a field day with it.
It's also 1,000 dollars.
I'm interested and supportive, but not enough to shell out a grand.
I'm guessing they're targeting the independently-wealthy geeks sympathetic to open-source and open hardware standards who don't mind having a second phone or don't care about app marketplaces and such.... Wait a second, who is going to buy this phone?
I can finally play GTA on my Apple computer? Awesome. :p
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I own the previous version of the openmoko phone, and that one doesn't work very well.
After meeting some of the people involved at FOSDEM this year I've joined the group buy for this device. It's a little on the expensive side, to be sure, but I joined not just because I would like the device itself but because I think they deserve support. It's pretty amazing that a small company such as theirs have been able to put together a working phone with most of the features you expect - sure it's not going to be the next iPhone killer, but it does have reasonable specs. I'm sure they had a lot of fun doing it as well, and I look forward to the opportunity to play with the hardware.
I'd encourage anyone who still has an older Neo1973 / Freerunner and who can spare the money to do the same.
Golden Delicious offers a Debian Squeeze for ARMEL distribution featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop environment.
I wish I had $800 bucks to spend. :(
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Do all of those things first, and for a price under $100, and you can establish a solid community of geeks willing to pay for a phone w/Open Hardware.
Here's the deal: I really want to encourage and support the OpenMoko folks, but with the original Freerunner I just couldn't justify buying something that didn't have even solid telephony features, didn't have much battery life, and wasn't in a price range I could even afford (as a student).
Look, all the geeks know that we don't have all of the parts figured out yet, and last I heard Welte is still working on the first fully-FOSS GSM stack, so it's not just as simple as putting the pieces together and selling enough units to hit your $100, 200, or 500 target price. But the thing is that $100 is a small enough number that I and most of the full-time-employed geek crowd out there can probably justify getting a v0.1 TotallyOpenPhone each year for the next 3-5 years. But we've got to convince both ourselves and our significant others (for those of us who have been consed) that this is a good or at least not-bad decision.
So how do we convince ourselves? Easy -- we say that this 2nd GSM phone can serve as a "backup" for our first phone, you know, if anything happens to it, or if we accidentally drop it down a flight of concrete stairs or drop it into the churn while making fresh butter in the morning (I don't care what Kilgore thinks; the smell of fresh butter is much better than napalm). This logic is excellent; it works even better the less you think about it.
ARMed with our bullet-proof logic, we can now easily divest our pocketbooks of $100 and hand it over to whoever is brave/smart/crazy enough to make a run of Open-Hardware phones. We give them the money now, and then -- here's the genius part -- we tell them that there's more where that came from, if they make us a better phone next year. If it's a much better phone with many more features, we might consider paying $150 or $200 for it, but we let them know that what will allow us to buy it (remember that part where we lied...umm... convinced ourselves that it was a good idea?) is the requirement that it be a solid, low-cost device.
$1000 is just way, way too high a price for a product like this. Unless there's a solid strategy to drastically cut the price of the phone each year over the next 3-5 years, I just can't see enough product shipping to make the business sustainable. And we really, REALLY do want it to be sustainable. We don't just want one Open Hardware Phone. We want to see competition and innovation. We want to see a marketplace of Open Hardware.
coding is life
The problem is not an open modem stack (in fact, many geeks are happy with phones where the modem is a black box), its convincing someone to sell you a modem chip-set or module at a reasonable price when you aren't making the massive quantity of handsets the big boys are making.
I think the biggest things the GTA04 team need to do (other than obvious improvements in the omap-side software stack) is to further negotiate with vendors to get more hardware information made public (e.g. finding a way to convince the vendor of the WiFi/Bluetooth chip to let them publish the schematic page for that chip) and to work with the makers of the UMTS module to improve the firmware to be more suitable for a cellphone vs the mobile broadband devices the module is usually used for.
It was the only mobile form factor I enjoyed working with. I dropped it and smashed the screen the summer the Droidx came out. And though I've enjoyed the Droid, I hung on the 755p because... well,$1000 is a bit rich, but I'll be holding on to the shell a bit longer now.
Wonder if Apple noticed Golden Delicious is a variety of apple.
Yeah, but unfortunately it's also one of the most bland and tasteless, at least as far as the modern examples on the UK market are concerned. Not a good association for me.
That said, if they want to name their product after an Apple, fair enough. Would I be right in assuming that Apple couldn't do anything about this sort of thing unless it was likely to cause confusion with an existing Apple product anyway?
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The problem is not an open modem stack ...I think the biggest things the GTA04 team need to do ...is to further negotiate with vendors to get more hardware information made public (e.g. finding a way to convince the vendor of the WiFi/Bluetooth chip to let them publish the schematic page for that chip)...
Is the primary issue that vendors of the miniature-sized versions of all of these chips and integrated boards aren't as open about releasing specs as we see in the desktop/server market?
There are a lot of different goals that a project like OpenMoko could have -- Open Hardware, a fully FOSS stack, over 2 days battery life, small form factor, etc... so I guess one of the first things to do is to define the goals of any particular device or family of devices.
For me, I think the idea of a fully-open phone system is pretty slick on its own, so I'd even consider buying an open system if they put it in big box and used higher-power components that would have to be plugged into the wall. The thing is that until we even get that model working, we don't have a starting point for improvement. Once you have a hacked-together phone working, then iterate, iterate, iterate until you get to something that can fit in your pocket, or that has a battery that will last a whole day without a recharge.
coding is life
I don't think there's a single word in the title that means what I thought it meant.
This is the open-source halo device that consumers will finally notice and then start switching to Linux desktop in droves as a result. Openmoko finally restores all the freedoms taken away by Apple's walled garden.
This is a game changer.
Consumers.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!