Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

The thing is, the world <i>still</i> 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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;r&#x2F;t drivers and what-not were usually the result of apathy (eg, manufacturers not shipping Linux drivers or OS&#x2F;2 drivers because of lack of perceived demand) rather than outright attempts to <i>stop</i> you from running Linux, OS&#x2F;2, etc.<p>Sadly, it doesn&#x27;t look like we&#x27;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. :-(

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 &quot;enlightenment vs qt vs gtk&quot; ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage...<p>But hey, they were the ones that tried.

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.<p>He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying &quot;Well, this isn&#x27;t a phone for people who like to get stuff done&quot;.

One of the issues in the open-source movement is the complete disregard for UX. Freedom is a noble goal, but I don&#x27;t care how free your software&#x2F;device is if I need to be an engineer and spend hours in the command line to accomplish a simple task.<p>Until this changes we won&#x27;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.

I still use a Freerunner (the successor to the Neo1973) as my only &#x27;phone.<p>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 &#x27;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.<p>Some annoyances I&#x27;ve had:<p>- The mic volume inexplicably getting set really low; I seem to remember fixing it via alsa.conf<p>- WPA WiFi doesn&#x27;t seem to work in the GUI; running wicd-curses in a console is fine<p>- Can&#x27;t manage to get audio out of a bluetooth headset<p>- 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&#x27;t been able to reinstate the old one :(

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

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

I had a freerunner.<p>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.<p>But IMHO the change of &quot;desktop&quot; 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.

My freerunner is somewhere in my old computerstuff bin, but the idea of having a completely open phone is still something I&#x27;m interested in.<p>They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock solid calling and wifi. It&#x27;s actually only recently (last year) that I moved to a smart phone, otherwise I&#x27;d happily support an open phone.<p>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.

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.<p>Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was almost identical: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;229243&#x2F;openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-a-time-machine-or-what" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;229243&#x2F;openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-...</a><p>Openmoko was also promoting the &quot;app store&quot; concept much earlier than Apple, which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone.<p>From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was before the iPhone was unveiled):<p>&quot;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. &quot;Maps look stunning on this screen,&quot; 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&#x27;s quad-band GSM&#x2F;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 &quot;AT&quot; 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, &quot;Applications are the ringtones of the future.&quot; [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, &quot;Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We&#x27;re hoping to change this.&quot; In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, &quot;Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. &quot;

If contracts weren&#x27;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..

If you&#x27;re no big company, it&#x27;s quite hard to build a device that is somewhat free, has current hardware specs and is cheap. There&#x27;s a small company that is trying to continue the openmoko phones: GolDelico (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goldelico.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goldelico.de&#x2F;</a>) They&#x27;re also involved in the Pyra and the Neo900. They are quite in need of support. ;)

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.

Still got one of those somewhere deep on the shelves.