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OpenMoko

July 14, 2007 at 9:07 am · Filed under oldbrew

Yesterday i came across the rather interesting OpenMoko project. In case anyone doesn’t know, it is a project (backed by FIC) to develop the world’s first truly “open” phone. As in, instead of buying your average mobile phone which is locked down to hell by your carrier, you get a phone which you can freely modify and develop for.

OpenMoko Neo1973

The first OpenMoko phone, the Neo1973 which is available now, is currently described as being targeted for developers, but will be released as a general consumer product in October of this year. The only difference being, the consumer version will have some extra hardware and is bound to be much more stable from a software standpoint.

In honesty i am half tempted to get the developer version, considering my current Motorola v3i is more or less abysmal from a development standpoint (i.e. You can make J2ME based apps for it, but 90% of the useful functionality doesn’t work). But of course, there is almost always a problem with first generation products, so i think i will stay away from it for a while.

Plus of course the Neo1973 doesn’t appear to have a camera.

A mobile phone without a camera?! What were they thinking?!

Still, i look forward to seeing OpenMoko making more cool open source phones!

Viewing 2 Comments

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    The v3i is the suckiest phone I've ever owned. I'm holding out on getting an iPhone until the next revision, and until I can switch SIM cards when I'm in another country. Instead I upgraded to an SE810i before flying out to America last month, and I couldn't be happier!

    I've been following OpenMoko with interest for quite some time, having discovered the project while surfing for interesting things to do with my Zaurus. There are definitely Compaq Flash cameras, and I wonder if some bright spark has released an SD slot camera yet?

    That aside, I resisted the temptation to buy a developers kit since it is really easy to run an emulator in your existing X server, and build applications for that -- which is how I ended up doing development for my Zaurus, since the Zaurus itself didn't have enough horsepower to run big gui compilations at a sensible speed.

    If you do give in to the temptation, I'd love to read about what you think of it.
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    Gaz,

    Sadly an SD slot camera wouldn't be very useful as the phone uses a mini sd slot. Under the battery.

    There might be hope in using a USB camera though, provided of course you could find one that doesn't draw power from the USB bus, as the phone supposedly supports USB's host mode but doesn't supply the power.

    I wouldn't mind an iPhone, but it is a bit expensive for me at the moment - up to 2x the price of the OpenMoko phone.
    Though then again the consumer version of the OpenMoko phone appears to be set at $400, $100 more than the developer preview. So the gap in pricing definitely starts to close up.

    With regards to the development kit emulator, i tried it out but found it was intolerably slow. Though then again that might have been because i was running it under Linux under Parallels Desktop under Mac OS X. Haha.

    Thanks for the suggestions

    James Urquhart
 

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