15 ms·

Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

105 points by richardboegli 9y ago

vsviridov 9y ago
It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage... But hey, they were the ones that tried.
- emilsedgh 9y ago
  1) There are still ongoing efforts, including Plasma Mobile. 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop. 3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed hardware.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    > 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop. In fact, as person trying to avoid both KDE and GNOME, I am so glad there was not one concerted effort in desktop environments. It's the only reason I still have choice. Had QT been GPLed originally, I wonder what the world of free desktop software would look like now.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
      The main problem with kde was the decision to rewrite everything for version 4 (and the same goes for gnome 2->3)
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        They went chasing the eyecandy, but ignored that what really cements a platform's utility is API stability...
        emilsedgh 9y ago
        That's just not true. Most of KDE's 3->4 rewrite was about rewriting from Qt3 to Qt4 for better API and also introducing abstraction layers like Solid and Phonon only and only for the sake of API stability.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        Well i witnessed more than one project just up and dump any pretext of supporting KDE3 once KDE4 was announced. If the APIs were stable, there would not be a need to drop one for the other. Look at the kernel, there have never been a situation where one have to go "sorry, but i only support X+1 from now on". Similarly, until the 64-bit version, and that in turn was because of hardware not software, one could run binaries from Windows 3.0 (at least) on present day Windows. That is the kind of stability i am talking about. That is the kind of stability that get third parties to stay with a platform.
        fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
        Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4
        audi100quattro 9y ago
        I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.
        fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
        That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)
  - vsviridov 9y ago
    Yeah, but they had a small time window to deliver a working product to have a small chance to penetrate the market. Instead the efforts were spread on tons of competing solutions. The resulting product was unusable. As much as I was an enthusiast and a fan of the idea the device I received was nowhere near ready for any kind of sensible use.
- notspanishflu 9y ago
  I'm following https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/ with hope.
nullc 9y ago
I had a Openmoko Neo1973, I managed to make a call on it once!
mindcrime 9y ago
The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris x86, OS/2 Warp, BeOS, Minix, Netware, etc., etc? Sure, getting audio and accelerated graphics to work could be a PITA for some combinations, and network card drivers were kinda iffy on Linux a long time ago... but still, by and large, it was YOUR machine and you could run whatever OS you wanted on it and do whatever you wanted with it. The shortcomings w/r/t drivers and what-not were usually the result of apathy (eg, manufacturers not shipping Linux drivers or OS/2 drivers because of lack of perceived demand) rather than outright attempts to stop you from running Linux, OS/2, etc. Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to build our own smartphones from components, but it would be nice if we could at least get manufacturers to stop actively blocking attempts to run alternate software and what-not. :-(
- mozartoz 9y ago
  Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better. All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    The Pyra is not going to be released anytime soon, the Neo900 is overpriced... but we do have Plasma Mobile running on a few devices.
    - subway 9y ago
      The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already. I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )
zphds 9y ago
As a Google Summer of Code student way back in 2008 for Openmoko, this brought a lot of memories :).
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I was looking for a new phone right before the OpenMoko was supposed to ship, and so I pointedly switched carriers to AT&T just because they were rumored to be the carrier where it was easiest to get an OpenMoko working. I bought a Motorola Atrix to use "until I can get an OpenMoko". Sadly, I never did get my hands on one of them. I don't even remember why now. Either they never shipped in volume at all, or the price was never within reach, or something. Anyway, I've been waiting a long time for a truly open smart-phone... and I'm still waiting. sigh Maybe one day.
- syedkarim 9y ago
  Were you working for Sean and Harold?
  - zphds 9y ago
    Mickey was my mentor and didn't get a chance to directly work with Sean and Harold. My project was to build APIs in Vala to control the hardware (volume, screen brightness, etc) through DBus. Was a great learning experience but could see the ominous signs towards the end of my summer. Got a device to hack on and the fact that I could SSH into a phone and have a shell to goof around was exciting back then. Android was just announced IIRC and getting it work on Freerunner was so much fun.
    - DrMickeyLauer 9y ago
      And you did a really good job! :-)
      - zphds 9y ago
        Haha! Thanks Mickey! Was a fun summer.
Rjevski 9y ago
One of the issues in the open-source movement is the complete disregard for UX. Freedom is a noble goal, but I don't care how free your software/device is if I need to be an engineer and spend hours in the command line to accomplish a simple task. Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. For such a phone to succeed it needs to be as easy to use (if not more) as its proprietary competitors.
- Nursie 9y ago
  >> Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. What's the "real world" here? Open Source software has made great strides in the mobile and server/datacentre space. Open source UIs used by the general public, less so sure. But then one could argue that most of the UI frameworks people use these days are open source and written in JS...
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Real world, as in non-technical users. Yes, open-source libraries are indeed everywhere - I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro. Sorry for the confusion.
    - Nursie 9y ago
      >> I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro Linux distros are huge in the datacentre and server farm, and AFAICT Android is open source.... But I do know what you're getting at, and Openmoko had a huge problem with UI/UX - it's not even that it was a bad UX, it's that the underlying platform was constantly shifting so radically that there wasn't a good base to build UX on!
jghn 9y ago
A friend of mine had one of those. He was making fun of my then fairly new iPhone and was trying to show me how he could run X Windows on his device. After about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work he gave up. I then sent him a text message, which took him another long period of time to figure out. He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying "Well, this isn't a phone for people who like to get stuff done".
audi100quattro 9y ago
If contracts weren't around in 2007, the Neo 1973 might have done better, but the price point was still high and is too high today compared to a $50 phone from amazon. Wanted one, but never got one..
mithron 9y ago
Still got one of those somewhere deep on the shelves.
mithron 9y ago
Still got one somewhere deep on the shelves and the last revisions of software in the cloud awaiting for some spare time to make it working.
Nursie 9y ago
I had a freerunner. It was great if you wanted to show someone the linux bootup text on a tiny screen. It was kinda fun to play with raw GPS data, running xterms and stuff onscreen, and various toy things. But IMHO the change of "desktop" environment about three times during the first year of release was a killer. The platform devs seemed to be switching around massive parts of the lower stack at the time they should have been stabilising so folks at other layers could build on it. Instead we were told over and over not to get too comfortable as it was all going to change (again) any day now. Eventually I had to buy a dumbphone to make calls, and switched out entirely to the Nokia N900 when it turned up.
- moepstar 9y ago
  Also, i recall the hardware being less than great (or even average), not even getting into the build quality... Getting a GPS fix? Why yes, wait for 2-5 minutes and be ready to lose it at the sight of a building in a far distance... Call/voice quality was abysmal - short: it was a nice gimmick with big ambitions, but it was not ready for prime time.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    Yeah, I remember that, GPS fixes took aaaaaaaages! Definitely wasn't ready for prime-time, but that wasn't a surprise. It's that it wasn't even ready for as FOSS loving geek who would have put up with a lot of unfinished, rough edges if it had been anywhere close to having a coherent platform. Instead the stack got changed every few weeks and the "star" developers seemed to be determined to churn out a new keyboard every release....
BenoitEssiambre 9y ago
You have to give attribution of some of the concepts behind the first iPhone to this project. I remember when the iPhone was unveiled, I immediately thought it was a better funded, better polished clone of Openmoko. Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was almost identical: http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-a-time-machine-or-what http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-... Openmoko was also promoting the "app store" concept much earlier than Apple, which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone. From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was before the iPhone was unveiled): "The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card. Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said. The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open. Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands. The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "
chriswarbo 9y ago
I still use a Freerunner (the successor to the Neo1973) as my only 'phone. The GTK-based om2007 it came with was a joke, and had already been ditched for EFL (Enlightenment) in om2008 when it arrived. The EFL UI got the job done, but all of the actual 'phone applications (contacts, SMS, calls, etc.) came from QtMobile (QtExtended), so I ended up installing QtMoko (Debian + QtMobile) and have been using it like that for years. Some annoyances I've had: - The mic volume inexplicably getting set really low; I seem to remember fixing it via alsa.conf - WPA WiFi doesn't seem to work in the GUI; running wicd-curses in a console is fine - Can't manage to get audio out of a bluetooth headset - The excellent predictive keyboard was ditched in an OS update in favour of a clunky non-predictive one. Apparently this was due to prediction only working well for English; as an Englishman, I was fine with that, but haven't been able to reinstate the old one :(
throw7 9y ago
My freerunner is somewhere in my old computerstuff bin, but the idea of having a completely open phone is still something I'm interested in. They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock solid calling and wifi. It's actually only recently (last year) that I moved to a smart phone, otherwise I'd happily support an open phone. Also, I believe the freerunner was not 100% open. My recollection was that both the GSM driver (either firmware or device driver) and the graphics driver (openmoko was unable to open up the source to the device driver although they tried) were closed.
some-username 9y ago
If you're no big company, it's quite hard to build a device that is somewhat free, has current hardware specs and is cheap. There's a small company that is trying to continue the openmoko phones: GolDelico (http://goldelico.de/ http://goldelico.de/) They're also involved in the Pyra and the Neo900. They are quite in need of support. ;)

105 points by richardboegli 9y ago

It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage... But hey, they were the ones that tried.

emilsedgh 9y ago
1) There are still ongoing efforts, including Plasma Mobile. 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop. 3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed hardware.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  > 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop. In fact, as person trying to avoid both KDE and GNOME, I am so glad there was not one concerted effort in desktop environments. It's the only reason I still have choice. Had QT been GPLed originally, I wonder what the world of free desktop software would look like now.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    The main problem with kde was the decision to rewrite everything for version 4 (and the same goes for gnome 2->3)
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      They went chasing the eyecandy, but ignored that what really cements a platform's utility is API stability...
      - emilsedgh 9y ago
        That's just not true. Most of KDE's 3->4 rewrite was about rewriting from Qt3 to Qt4 for better API and also introducing abstraction layers like Solid and Phonon only and only for the sake of API stability.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        Well i witnessed more than one project just up and dump any pretext of supporting KDE3 once KDE4 was announced. If the APIs were stable, there would not be a need to drop one for the other. Look at the kernel, there have never been a situation where one have to go "sorry, but i only support X+1 from now on". Similarly, until the 64-bit version, and that in turn was because of hardware not software, one could run binaries from Windows 3.0 (at least) on present day Windows. That is the kind of stability i am talking about. That is the kind of stability that get third parties to stay with a platform.
        fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
        Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4
        audi100quattro 9y ago
        I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.
        fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
        That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)
- vsviridov 9y ago
  Yeah, but they had a small time window to deliver a working product to have a small chance to penetrate the market. Instead the efforts were spread on tons of competing solutions. The resulting product was unusable. As much as I was an enthusiast and a fan of the idea the device I received was nowhere near ready for any kind of sensible use.
notspanishflu 9y ago
I'm following https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/ with hope.

nullc 9y ago

I had a Openmoko Neo1973, I managed to make a call on it once!

mindcrime 9y ago

The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris x86, OS/2 Warp, BeOS, Minix, Netware, etc., etc? Sure, getting audio and accelerated graphics to work could be a PITA for some combinations, and network card drivers were kinda iffy on Linux a long time ago... but still, by and large, it was YOUR machine and you could run whatever OS you wanted on it and do whatever you wanted with it. The shortcomings w/r/t drivers and what-not were usually the result of apathy (eg, manufacturers not shipping Linux drivers or OS/2 drivers because of lack of perceived demand) rather than outright attempts to stop you from running Linux, OS/2, etc. Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to build our own smartphones from components, but it would be nice if we could at least get manufacturers to stop actively blocking attempts to run alternate software and what-not. :-(

mozartoz 9y ago
Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better. All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  The Pyra is not going to be released anytime soon, the Neo900 is overpriced... but we do have Plasma Mobile running on a few devices.
  - subway 9y ago
    The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already. I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )

zphds 9y ago

As a Google Summer of Code student way back in 2008 for Openmoko, this brought a lot of memories :).

mindcrime 9y ago
I was looking for a new phone right before the OpenMoko was supposed to ship, and so I pointedly switched carriers to AT&T just because they were rumored to be the carrier where it was easiest to get an OpenMoko working. I bought a Motorola Atrix to use "until I can get an OpenMoko". Sadly, I never did get my hands on one of them. I don't even remember why now. Either they never shipped in volume at all, or the price was never within reach, or something. Anyway, I've been waiting a long time for a truly open smart-phone... and I'm still waiting. sigh Maybe one day.
syedkarim 9y ago
Were you working for Sean and Harold?
- zphds 9y ago
  Mickey was my mentor and didn't get a chance to directly work with Sean and Harold. My project was to build APIs in Vala to control the hardware (volume, screen brightness, etc) through DBus. Was a great learning experience but could see the ominous signs towards the end of my summer. Got a device to hack on and the fact that I could SSH into a phone and have a shell to goof around was exciting back then. Android was just announced IIRC and getting it work on Freerunner was so much fun.
  - DrMickeyLauer 9y ago
    And you did a really good job! :-)
    - zphds 9y ago
      Haha! Thanks Mickey! Was a fun summer.

Rjevski 9y ago

One of the issues in the open-source movement is the complete disregard for UX. Freedom is a noble goal, but I don't care how free your software/device is if I need to be an engineer and spend hours in the command line to accomplish a simple task. Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. For such a phone to succeed it needs to be as easy to use (if not more) as its proprietary competitors.

Nursie 9y ago
>> Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. What's the "real world" here? Open Source software has made great strides in the mobile and server/datacentre space. Open source UIs used by the general public, less so sure. But then one could argue that most of the UI frameworks people use these days are open source and written in JS...
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Real world, as in non-technical users. Yes, open-source libraries are indeed everywhere - I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro. Sorry for the confusion.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    >> I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro Linux distros are huge in the datacentre and server farm, and AFAICT Android is open source.... But I do know what you're getting at, and Openmoko had a huge problem with UI/UX - it's not even that it was a bad UX, it's that the underlying platform was constantly shifting so radically that there wasn't a good base to build UX on!

jghn 9y ago

A friend of mine had one of those. He was making fun of my then fairly new iPhone and was trying to show me how he could run X Windows on his device. After about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work he gave up. I then sent him a text message, which took him another long period of time to figure out. He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying "Well, this isn't a phone for people who like to get stuff done".

audi100quattro 9y ago

If contracts weren't around in 2007, the Neo 1973 might have done better, but the price point was still high and is too high today compared to a $50 phone from amazon. Wanted one, but never got one..

mithron 9y ago

Still got one of those somewhere deep on the shelves.

mithron 9y ago

Still got one somewhere deep on the shelves and the last revisions of software in the cloud awaiting for some spare time to make it working.

Nursie 9y ago

I had a freerunner. It was great if you wanted to show someone the linux bootup text on a tiny screen. It was kinda fun to play with raw GPS data, running xterms and stuff onscreen, and various toy things. But IMHO the change of "desktop" environment about three times during the first year of release was a killer. The platform devs seemed to be switching around massive parts of the lower stack at the time they should have been stabilising so folks at other layers could build on it. Instead we were told over and over not to get too comfortable as it was all going to change (again) any day now. Eventually I had to buy a dumbphone to make calls, and switched out entirely to the Nokia N900 when it turned up.

moepstar 9y ago
Also, i recall the hardware being less than great (or even average), not even getting into the build quality... Getting a GPS fix? Why yes, wait for 2-5 minutes and be ready to lose it at the sight of a building in a far distance... Call/voice quality was abysmal - short: it was a nice gimmick with big ambitions, but it was not ready for prime time.
- Nursie 9y ago
  Yeah, I remember that, GPS fixes took aaaaaaaages! Definitely wasn't ready for prime-time, but that wasn't a surprise. It's that it wasn't even ready for as FOSS loving geek who would have put up with a lot of unfinished, rough edges if it had been anywhere close to having a coherent platform. Instead the stack got changed every few weeks and the "star" developers seemed to be determined to churn out a new keyboard every release....

BenoitEssiambre 9y ago

You have to give attribution of some of the concepts behind the first iPhone to this project. I remember when the iPhone was unveiled, I immediately thought it was a better funded, better polished clone of Openmoko. Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was almost identical: http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-a-time-machine-or-what http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-... Openmoko was also promoting the "app store" concept much earlier than Apple, which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone. From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was before the iPhone was unveiled): "The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card. Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said. The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open. Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands. The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "

chriswarbo 9y ago

I still use a Freerunner (the successor to the Neo1973) as my only 'phone. The GTK-based om2007 it came with was a joke, and had already been ditched for EFL (Enlightenment) in om2008 when it arrived. The EFL UI got the job done, but all of the actual 'phone applications (contacts, SMS, calls, etc.) came from QtMobile (QtExtended), so I ended up installing QtMoko (Debian + QtMobile) and have been using it like that for years. Some annoyances I've had: - The mic volume inexplicably getting set really low; I seem to remember fixing it via alsa.conf - WPA WiFi doesn't seem to work in the GUI; running wicd-curses in a console is fine - Can't manage to get audio out of a bluetooth headset - The excellent predictive keyboard was ditched in an OS update in favour of a clunky non-predictive one. Apparently this was due to prediction only working well for English; as an Englishman, I was fine with that, but haven't been able to reinstate the old one :(

throw7 9y ago

My freerunner is somewhere in my old computerstuff bin, but the idea of having a completely open phone is still something I'm interested in. They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock solid calling and wifi. It's actually only recently (last year) that I moved to a smart phone, otherwise I'd happily support an open phone. Also, I believe the freerunner was not 100% open. My recollection was that both the GSM driver (either firmware or device driver) and the graphics driver (openmoko was unable to open up the source to the device driver although they tried) were closed.

some-username 9y ago

If you're no big company, it's quite hard to build a device that is somewhat free, has current hardware specs and is cheap. There's a small company that is trying to continue the openmoko phones: GolDelico (http://goldelico.de/ http://goldelico.de/) They're also involved in the Pyra and the Neo900. They are quite in need of support. ;)