But it's still (almost) true. Of course such phones *can* be built, it's just a matter of money and time tossed on it. Problem is somewhere else - how do you plan to make such phones competitive at all. How do you want to provide high performance? Battery time? Low latencies? Low price? Size that will still fit in the pocket?
Mobile devices are evolving to be more integrated, not less. Modularity requires you to give up any integration - which makes things like high performance or long battery time hard to achieve. What's important - you cannot even simply sacrifice one of it, as odds are that it won't help much with others anyway - unless you sacrifice modularity of course.
Ara is just a R&D project. Maybe it will bring some useful knowledge that will be later integrated into real devices - but I don't think it will bring the oh-my-god-so-modular phone to the market. I'm more excited about projects like Neo900 - this is how "modularity" in mobile devices should be achieved. Plus the solution with two PCBs gives hope for even more "modularity" in future, with potential partial updates.
Looks like in USA it was the same like in Europe. We here also had simlocks, making the phone working only with carrier you bought it at. But so what? You always could just buy the phone outside the carriers. Most of people didn't - but that doesn't mean that they couldn't. Of course that would mean paying something like $399 instead of $1 plus two-year contract.
Now there are laws that require carriers to remove simlock after contract expires and most of operators don't even install the simlocks anymore. But that doesn't matter for me. What matters is the mere ability, and knowing that some CDMA carriers in US aren't even using SIMs and just sell preactivated phones instead, I was afraid that some of this lunacy is also present with GSM carriers when I was reading comments like "maybe in Europe, but in US it's not possible".
But it seems like it's just people not aware of their own market, but behaving like they actually are - and that's the thing I don't care about. If you want to be conscious customer, you do your research before buying anything, so it's your fault if you don't know that you don't have to buy your new phone locked by the carrier:)
Android is free software as well, so what? Its application in real life generally is not, and judging from how well Firefox OS is able to overcome it (hint: it isn't), Ubuntu for phones will probably just follow the same path.
"Enjoy our awesome free system, but if device manufacturer locked down the bootloader and made access to root account troublesome, then it's not our fault, but manufacturers!"
Fortunately projects like OpenPhoenux exist, Neo900 will be available in few months. Both Firefox OS and Ubuntu for phones should work on it, as well as many other distros, including standard PC ones (making Debian usable as a phone is a matter of few apt-get installs and some basic configuration); without any proprietary drivers sans GPU acceleration (but looking at Replicant 4.2 running smoothly on GTA04 without 3D acceleration, I guess you can live without it if you really care about "software purity").
While Mozilla and Canonical might be doing some good job in software development, I simply don't care about their efforts in building hardware ecosystem, as they're even not trying to hide that they're doing it exactly the same like Android one, and that's unacceptable for me.
I don't know about Verizon, but people on Neo900's "compatible carriers" forum thread came into conclusion that there shouldn't be any problem with Neo900 compatibility on AT&T network, citing AT&T itself: http://www.att.com/shop/wirele...
So is AT&T lying on this page? You know, I'm one of the people working on Neo900, so I'd be grateful for some proof in case it's true, so we can properly warn our users:P
Based on comments above, looks like it is. I have yet to see any reason for why people in USA can't do that, other than their own laziness.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some people from USA in Openmoko community, using their US-banded version of Neo Freerunner. Given that the only way to buy Freerunner was described by me in parent comment, as no carrier even sold those phones, I conclude that it must be possible. What's more - nowadays phones are quad- or five-banded, so you don't even need separate US and Europe versions, like tri-banded Freerunner had.
Of course I can be wrong, but then I'd like to be proven wrong instead of just hearing "everything is not like where you are".
Then just buy a phone from Europe? Or straight from manufacturer? I can easily buy US-banded version of Neo Freerunner or GTA04. Probably won't be problematic to buy any US-compatible Android phone from eBay as well. AFAIK ZTE Open is even sold there straight from the manufacturer. So you're telling me that all those phones won't work in US? What's the problem then?
Uhmm, are they? I never bought any smartphone on contract with operator. The last phone I bought like that was a standard dumb phone many years ago.
Of course there are offers like that, but saying that "smartphones are tied to contracts" is bullshit. You just buy a phone, put SIM in and you're ready to go. If you're doing it in different way, that's your problem.
I think that if Nokia was in better state few years ago, Elop wouldn't be chosen as a CEO at all, so he wouldn't have a possibility to destroy it. But maybe that's just me being naive:)
>earlier management said to retire Symbian and migrate to the newer system
They did, but not before years of internal competition making both teams reinvent the wheel and limiting collaboration between them. Maemo 6/Meego as seen on Nokia N9 was entirely reimplemented three times. When it all started, Symbian team was also doing transition to Qt - just like Maemo; but internal conflicts, on both management and "engineers morale" levels led them to implement completely separate, incompatible libraries, wasting time of both teams.
Management eventually made a right decision, but it was already too late to stop Elop from destroying it all completely.
That's what I've been referring to. Putting some parts together to get modem working on Raspberry Pi maybe isn't hard, but it's definitely a great experience for a hobbyist doing something like that for the first time. In contrast, adding WiFi module and installing some SIP software on it is actually brain-dead simple (apt-get install linphone?:P) - it won't teach you anything more, and it won't work in any reasonable way as well thanks to Raspberry Pi limitations.
Doing stuff like that is great when they're fun, you can learn something from it or you can brag about it. Implementing suggestions above will provide none of these things, while it might provide a disappointment when you'll keep your hopes too high.
Unfortunately, Maemo/Meego plan was internally fought over by the Symbian team, creating unnecessary, unhealthy competition inside Nokia and delaying success of any of them. When Nokia finally realized that it was Maemo that had greatest potential for future, not Symbian, they were already quite a lot behind competitors. Elop could either make risky, but potentially beneficial for the company decision in favor of Maemo/Meego, or take an easy road as a trojan horse, mostly beneficial for himself and for stakeholders in short term.
It's a pretty sad story about major mistakes in management of a very big player, which at its last chance to return into significance after couple of bad moves was just kicked in its balls by someone who was supposed to take care of it and gradually sold cheaply.
I guess it depends on the case you'll put it into. If it'll look like a regular old brick-phone, then there will be no difference between mass-produced and "DIY" one. Both of them will be subject to active eavesdropping by BTSes inside the airport and will be prevented to connect to regular ones outside the airport with jamming, so with "DIY" one you're just as "safe" as with the regular one.
For WiFi SIP you could just use phones like Neo900, GTA04 or maybe even Freerunner. Each of them will give you better battery life, better performance (except Freerunner) and won't require you to run proprietary software on them, unlike Raspberry Pi.
Such DIY project is very nice thing to do as a part of your hobby, but any practical usage will be killed by lack of proper power management.
Also, "The choice of Canonical to use a binary only baseband is even more disappointing when Osmocom have already produced a functional open-source GSM baseband for the Calypso chipset. One must wonder why was this not adopted or improved upon by the talented individuals at Canonical, especially given the previous enthusiasm for open-source philosophy."
The reason is simple. They didn't want to limit their capabilities to 2G EDGE. I suppose that the target niche that could accept such limitation to gain some freedom already has their Freerunners in their pockets.
I so much want a free device and I completely agree with the spirit of the article, but it's unfortunately so damn wrong at technical level it hurts:(
If the open source baseband was even remotely feasible to do, open projects like Openmoko, OpenPhoenux (GTA04, Neo900) together with OsmocomBB would already come up with 100% open GSM device. The people working on those project dream to be able to do that, but they simply can't. OsmocomBB is practically a research project, as there are no practical use-cases for it to "normal user" (in most countries it's illegal to use modem with OsmocomBB on it unless you're operating it with your own BTS-lab network you got permission to set up for development or research purposes), and it only operates on very old devices with TI Calypso, as basically all of more modern basebands are cryptographically signed (TI Calypso was also supposed to be, but for some unknown reason that feature was disabled, probably due to misconfiguration at the factory - this is the only reason OsmocomBB was possible at all).
Unless we do lots of legal lobbying and raise much more resources than a company like Canonical has (trust me, building proper 4G modem is awfully hard and expensive. You have to comply to several thousands pages of protocol documentation and pass many certifications. Canonical probably could would be able to afford producing Ubuntu Edge, but they certainly won't be able to afford the modem development), it's much more helpful to look at projects like Neo900 ( http://neo900.org/ ) which aim for the best possible separation between APE and the baseband with built-in monitoring in case you suspect modem might be doing something malicious. In my opinion, this is the proper step forward the truly free mobile devices in our pockets, not shouting and demanding open basebands (even if we all, including Neo900 developers, dream about them).
In fact, all you need is for instance some TI Calypso based phone, like Openmoko Neo Freerunner or some old Motorolas, and OsmocomBB firmware. And of course lack of fear when you're doing something like that illegally.
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>I want these services off my phone.
How can you say that and yet still buy such devices? It's not like one doesn't have a choice...
With enough skill you can replace broken parts in "non-modular" mobile phones as well. That's not the problem.
Try to upgrade CPU on your laptop, let's say from Sandy Bridge to Haswell. Then we can talk.
Exactly. Replacement can be even done in current mobile phones, that's not a big issue.
But it's still (almost) true. Of course such phones *can* be built, it's just a matter of money and time tossed on it. Problem is somewhere else - how do you plan to make such phones competitive at all. How do you want to provide high performance? Battery time? Low latencies? Low price? Size that will still fit in the pocket?
Mobile devices are evolving to be more integrated, not less. Modularity requires you to give up any integration - which makes things like high performance or long battery time hard to achieve. What's important - you cannot even simply sacrifice one of it, as odds are that it won't help much with others anyway - unless you sacrifice modularity of course.
Ara is just a R&D project. Maybe it will bring some useful knowledge that will be later integrated into real devices - but I don't think it will bring the oh-my-god-so-modular phone to the market. I'm more excited about projects like Neo900 - this is how "modularity" in mobile devices should be achieved. Plus the solution with two PCBs gives hope for even more "modularity" in future, with potential partial updates.
Why not? I'm doing that on my Openmoko Neo Freerunner for past 6 years. Same on Nokia N900, OpenPhoenux GTA04 and soon Neo900.
If you choose to buy crippled, locked-down phones, then you're the only one to blame.
Looks like in USA it was the same like in Europe. We here also had simlocks, making the phone working only with carrier you bought it at. But so what? You always could just buy the phone outside the carriers. Most of people didn't - but that doesn't mean that they couldn't. Of course that would mean paying something like $399 instead of $1 plus two-year contract.
Now there are laws that require carriers to remove simlock after contract expires and most of operators don't even install the simlocks anymore. But that doesn't matter for me. What matters is the mere ability, and knowing that some CDMA carriers in US aren't even using SIMs and just sell preactivated phones instead, I was afraid that some of this lunacy is also present with GSM carriers when I was reading comments like "maybe in Europe, but in US it's not possible".
But it seems like it's just people not aware of their own market, but behaving like they actually are - and that's the thing I don't care about. If you want to be conscious customer, you do your research before buying anything, so it's your fault if you don't know that you don't have to buy your new phone locked by the carrier :)
Android is free software as well, so what? Its application in real life generally is not, and judging from how well Firefox OS is able to overcome it (hint: it isn't), Ubuntu for phones will probably just follow the same path.
"Enjoy our awesome free system, but if device manufacturer locked down the bootloader and made access to root account troublesome, then it's not our fault, but manufacturers!"
Fortunately projects like OpenPhoenux exist, Neo900 will be available in few months. Both Firefox OS and Ubuntu for phones should work on it, as well as many other distros, including standard PC ones (making Debian usable as a phone is a matter of few apt-get installs and some basic configuration); without any proprietary drivers sans GPU acceleration (but looking at Replicant 4.2 running smoothly on GTA04 without 3D acceleration, I guess you can live without it if you really care about "software purity").
While Mozilla and Canonical might be doing some good job in software development, I simply don't care about their efforts in building hardware ecosystem, as they're even not trying to hide that they're doing it exactly the same like Android one, and that's unacceptable for me.
I don't know about Verizon, but people on Neo900's "compatible carriers" forum thread came into conclusion that there shouldn't be any problem with Neo900 compatibility on AT&T network, citing AT&T itself: http://www.att.com/shop/wirele...
So is AT&T lying on this page? You know, I'm one of the people working on Neo900, so I'd be grateful for some proof in case it's true, so we can properly warn our users :P
Based on comments above, looks like it is. I have yet to see any reason for why people in USA can't do that, other than their own laziness.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some people from USA in Openmoko community, using their US-banded version of Neo Freerunner. Given that the only way to buy Freerunner was described by me in parent comment, as no carrier even sold those phones, I conclude that it must be possible. What's more - nowadays phones are quad- or five-banded, so you don't even need separate US and Europe versions, like tri-banded Freerunner had.
Of course I can be wrong, but then I'd like to be proven wrong instead of just hearing "everything is not like where you are".
Then just buy a phone from Europe? Or straight from manufacturer? I can easily buy US-banded version of Neo Freerunner or GTA04. Probably won't be problematic to buy any US-compatible Android phone from eBay as well. AFAIK ZTE Open is even sold there straight from the manufacturer. So you're telling me that all those phones won't work in US? What's the problem then?
Uhmm, are they? I never bought any smartphone on contract with operator. The last phone I bought like that was a standard dumb phone many years ago.
Of course there are offers like that, but saying that "smartphones are tied to contracts" is bullshit. You just buy a phone, put SIM in and you're ready to go. If you're doing it in different way, that's your problem.
I think that if Nokia was in better state few years ago, Elop wouldn't be chosen as a CEO at all, so he wouldn't have a possibility to destroy it. But maybe that's just me being naive :)
>earlier management said to retire Symbian and migrate to the newer system
They did, but not before years of internal competition making both teams reinvent the wheel and limiting collaboration between them. Maemo 6/Meego as seen on Nokia N9 was entirely reimplemented three times. When it all started, Symbian team was also doing transition to Qt - just like Maemo; but internal conflicts, on both management and "engineers morale" levels led them to implement completely separate, incompatible libraries, wasting time of both teams.
Management eventually made a right decision, but it was already too late to stop Elop from destroying it all completely.
That's what I've been referring to. Putting some parts together to get modem working on Raspberry Pi maybe isn't hard, but it's definitely a great experience for a hobbyist doing something like that for the first time. In contrast, adding WiFi module and installing some SIP software on it is actually brain-dead simple (apt-get install linphone? :P) - it won't teach you anything more, and it won't work in any reasonable way as well thanks to Raspberry Pi limitations.
Doing stuff like that is great when they're fun, you can learn something from it or you can brag about it. Implementing suggestions above will provide none of these things, while it might provide a disappointment when you'll keep your hopes too high.
Because extending the scope of cool project from cool to pointless is just... pointless :)
By the way, this is not the first DIY mobile phone: here's a phone made out of Nokia N810 Internet Tablet: http://talk.maemo.org/showthre...
Unfortunately, Maemo/Meego plan was internally fought over by the Symbian team, creating unnecessary, unhealthy competition inside Nokia and delaying success of any of them. When Nokia finally realized that it was Maemo that had greatest potential for future, not Symbian, they were already quite a lot behind competitors. Elop could either make risky, but potentially beneficial for the company decision in favor of Maemo/Meego, or take an easy road as a trojan horse, mostly beneficial for himself and for stakeholders in short term.
It's a pretty sad story about major mistakes in management of a very big player, which at its last chance to return into significance after couple of bad moves was just kicked in its balls by someone who was supposed to take care of it and gradually sold cheaply.
There's no need for that.
I guess it depends on the case you'll put it into. If it'll look like a regular old brick-phone, then there will be no difference between mass-produced and "DIY" one. Both of them will be subject to active eavesdropping by BTSes inside the airport and will be prevented to connect to regular ones outside the airport with jamming, so with "DIY" one you're just as "safe" as with the regular one.
Any other interpretation is basically impossible, so well...
For WiFi SIP you could just use phones like Neo900, GTA04 or maybe even Freerunner. Each of them will give you better battery life, better performance (except Freerunner) and won't require you to run proprietary software on them, unlike Raspberry Pi.
Such DIY project is very nice thing to do as a part of your hobby, but any practical usage will be killed by lack of proper power management.
Also, "The choice of Canonical to use a binary only baseband is even more disappointing when Osmocom have already produced a functional open-source GSM baseband for the Calypso chipset. One must wonder why was this not adopted or improved upon by the talented individuals at Canonical, especially given the previous enthusiasm for open-source philosophy."
The reason is simple. They didn't want to limit their capabilities to 2G EDGE. I suppose that the target niche that could accept such limitation to gain some freedom already has their Freerunners in their pockets.
I so much want a free device and I completely agree with the spirit of the article, but it's unfortunately so damn wrong at technical level it hurts :(
If the open source baseband was even remotely feasible to do, open projects like Openmoko, OpenPhoenux (GTA04, Neo900) together with OsmocomBB would already come up with 100% open GSM device. The people working on those project dream to be able to do that, but they simply can't. OsmocomBB is practically a research project, as there are no practical use-cases for it to "normal user" (in most countries it's illegal to use modem with OsmocomBB on it unless you're operating it with your own BTS-lab network you got permission to set up for development or research purposes), and it only operates on very old devices with TI Calypso, as basically all of more modern basebands are cryptographically signed (TI Calypso was also supposed to be, but for some unknown reason that feature was disabled, probably due to misconfiguration at the factory - this is the only reason OsmocomBB was possible at all).
Unless we do lots of legal lobbying and raise much more resources than a company like Canonical has (trust me, building proper 4G modem is awfully hard and expensive. You have to comply to several thousands pages of protocol documentation and pass many certifications. Canonical probably could would be able to afford producing Ubuntu Edge, but they certainly won't be able to afford the modem development), it's much more helpful to look at projects like Neo900 ( http://neo900.org/ ) which aim for the best possible separation between APE and the baseband with built-in monitoring in case you suspect modem might be doing something malicious. In my opinion, this is the proper step forward the truly free mobile devices in our pockets, not shouting and demanding open basebands (even if we all, including Neo900 developers, dream about them).
Just drown out 3G signal near the victim and make it connect to your own 2G station. Piece of cake.
In fact, all you need is for instance some TI Calypso based phone, like Openmoko Neo Freerunner or some old Motorolas, and OsmocomBB firmware. And of course lack of fear when you're doing something like that illegally.