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Neo900 Hacker Phone Reaches Minimum Number of Pre-Orders For Production
First time accepted submitter wick3t writes "The Neo900 fundraising campaign has already achieved the milestone of 200 pre-orders which means that mass production is now feasible. This follows a successful first prototype that was showcased at the OpenPhoenux-Hard-Software-Workshop 2013. Their next target is 1000 pre-orders as they aspire to reduce the production costs of each device."
For those not familiar, the Neo 900 is an offshoot of the OpenMoko GTA04 designed for use in the popular Nokia N900 case (and, yes, they're fixing the weak usb port).
but there can't be another smartphone, it's economically impossible!
Why does this phone get produced but the Ubuntu Edge doesn't?
I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.
...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.
Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.
All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)
Boo.
My slashdot sig was once, "2010: The Year of Linux on the Phone". That year saw many new phones running Android and a few other Linux OSs, remarkable advancement from Android 1.5 to 2.2, and a huge increase in Android users and percentage of smart phones. Android is now past 80% of smartphones and climbing. I used to have an Android decal on my car, but I took it off because it was too mainstream. It was like saying I supported computers. I hope we have more competitors in this space, like Sailfish, but we are way past the year of Linux in your pocket.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Riiight. Except that they are using the same Chinese labor to make this phone as everyone else uses?
It might be true to some components sourced externally, but Neo900 itself is going to be manufactured in Bavaria (Germany), just like GTA04 was.
but will it work with my family's ATT wireless plan?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Because Ubuntu Edge cost four times as much? $625 was a lot to spend on a product that hadn't even been built, especially from a company that has no previous record when it comes to hardware.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think it just depends on how much effort you want to put into misusing it. Penguins are birds that swim you know. Its all about adaptability and willpower.
Sure, those are the components and those are manufactured wherever Texas Instruments, Panasonic and other vendors manufacture them. The Neo900 itself will however be assembled in Germany, as that's the best the project can do with its resources (similarly to what Raspberry Pi did with assembling in UK).
I am all for open hardware but I guess I would just root a cheap popular android phone, then load whatever variety of rom I that fit what I wanted. Also, a problem I see if since it's a keyboard phone, why only 3 rows ? Ive always have phones like that myself, and still do, but I always look for 4 rows, full number & letter keys.
Can't buy this for the same reason why I didn't buy the n900, the terrible resistive touchscreen. It was a terrible choice, as all the android and iOS devices of note were capacitive at the time.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
they might have a shot with 20k, but 200 is ridiculous.... it's closer to the sample size that one would use for for pre-production testing.
Is it going to come with the classic Nokia ringtone?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
In the EU look to Fairphone for a device without the slave labor, rampant pollution and closed systems. They are delivering this month(!) and on a scale of >32,000 units for their first run (original goal was 25k). Price is 325 euros.
Hopefully after an initial success, they will want to make one for the US market. Even so, I'd consider using one of the EU models in the US as a small tablet.
Sort of like the Linux on my desktop. Linux is not a GUI, it is a kernel. The last time I "saw Linux" was a kernel panic about a year ago.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Sort of like the Linux on my desktop. Linux is not a GUI, it is a kernel. The last time I "saw Linux" was a kernel panic about a year ago.
So you are a Stallman-ite denier that "Linux" can refer anything beyond the kernel. Fine.
Android is not simply a GUI, it is a complete OS environment. Android is the target platform, not Linux. With the GUIs you refer to the target platform is still Linux. Read "Linux" as "GNU/Linux" if you must.
If you think you can compare the Fairphone to the Neo900 then you have failed to understand the concept behind the Neo900. The Fairphone is just another Android phone. The Neo900 is for people who are fed up with the closed, walled garden approaches of Android and iOS and want the power of a general purpose computer in their pocket. The device is expected to ship with Debian GNU/Linux with support for Maemo 5 coming later when it's ready. The hardware keyboard and stylus also help to give it that desktop feel.
the world moved on. When the N900 came out, it was one of the best phones available, both in package and in software. But it has been over four years now. The world has moved on. It has moved on to slimmer phones, larger screens, not to mention better touch screens (yes, I have used the N900, and the screen is way worse than the touch screen of my Galaxy Nexus). I type faster with Swype than I ever did with the QWERTY-keyboard, the screen is better, it fits better in my pocket, it is lighter, etc.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
That graph includes tablets; I was referring to just phones, being that the subject was on pockets.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I remember a few years ago I said (on Slashdot) that soon the only open computers would be expensive niche products from tiny companies...it's now true for mobile devices. How long until the rest of computing follows?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They were common until the iPhone came out. PalmOS was a closed-source OS but you were free to run anything you liked on their range of devices. Same with Windows Mobile and Windows CE. The only "walled garden" mobile OS that existed before iOS was Symbian.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Um, I think its you who are mistaken by lumping Android (choice of OS and app sources) in with iOS (Apple-only source).
FairPhone are making sure the hardware will work with FOSS versions of Android and they are going as far as to test with other OS's like Firefox; the phone is designed to have the users' choice of OS installed onto it. That is a huge difference from the typical Android vendor.
It might be different from the typical Android vendor but the Neo900 is not aiming to be an Android replacement.
Have you ever tried running normal Linux tasks on Android such as compiling a C program, "ssh -X", running strace, etc.? Ever tried running X11 or Wayland instead of SurfaceFlinger? I think you'll find that Android's environment is not very well suited for these kind of tasks. Google's chose to use Bionic libc making Android makes it largely incompatible with the desktop and server Linux we know and love. Firefox OS is based on Android and also uses Bionic libc. Most regular Linux apps require extensive modification if you want to build them to run Android. These same apps can be recompiled for Debian ARM or Maemo 5 with little or no modification at all.
Of course if Android is your thing, the Neo900 is expected to run the Replicant variant which is already running on the GTA04 that it is based on.