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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).
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.
It might be true to some components sourced externally, but Neo900 itself is going to be manufactured in Bavaria (Germany), just like GTA04 was.
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.
According to their FAQ, the modem will support the UMTS frequencies used by both AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
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).
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.
That's "mass production" as in producing in bulk, i.e. not producing one-off prototypes which is very expensive. 200 devices is the minimum they need to produce the boards in bulk. This is a niche, community project aimed at FOSS and/or open hardware enthusiasts who want the flexibility of a general purpose PC on their mobile phones. There are many of us so these numbers are to be expected.
but will it work with my family's ATT wireless plan?
Short version: yes. AT&T's GSM network does not automatically boot off devices that it doesnt recognize, although you will get no customer support for a device that hasn't gone through their extensive network certification process.
So your family plan will work if you swap your current SIMs out of your devices and into this phone. If you go into an AT&T store and say "what plans can I get with my Neo900?" they will stare at you blankly and try to sell you an iPhone... not out of malice but because they have no idea what it is. If the Neo900 has a different sized-SIM than what you currently use, just ask AT&T for a new SIM of that size with no device order and do the swap, it should work.
"95% of all Slashdot
Is it going to come with the classic Nokia ringtone?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
The thing is, a rooted android phone is still very far from being an open platform.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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.