Opensource phone?
September 18th, 2007 | by Futt | 445 views
A while ago, I invested in a Nokia N95 Smartphone running the Symbian S60 3rd ed. operating system. It’s a great phone, with all the features you expect from a high-end smartphone: 3.5G, A-GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel camera, MP3 player, up to 2GB of storage.
Never the less, there are much more interesting things on the horizon, particularly in the Linux based smartphone arena. I’ve been looking at two of the most promising projects, the OpenMoko Neo1973 and the Qtopia Greenphone unit.
Norwegian technology innovator Trolltech is probably best known in the Linux community for it’s QT C++ toolkit, which is the foundation upon which the popular KDE desktop environment is built. They also provide a platform for portable computing called QTopia, which runs on a variety of hardware platforms, mostly PDAs and tablet PCs.
Trolltech has also launched QTopia Phone Edition, a version of the QTopia mobile platform tailored for use in mobile smartphones. The reference- and development platform for QTopia Mobile Edition is the QTopia Greenphone. The device itself sports features such as a QVGA touchscreen (and keypad), onboard 312MHz ARM processor, MiniSD slot, tri-band GSM/GPRS, bluetooth and a camera.
More important than the hardware though, is the onboard operating system - QTopia Mobile Edition. This piece of software, combined with the community software development kit available from qtopia.net, makes the Greenphone into a powerful, complete open (and closed) source mobile development platform.
According to a recent Trolltech announcement, QTopia Mobile Edition will now also run on the other interesting opensource phone project available, the OpenMoko Neo1973.
OpenMoko is a Linux based mobile platform designed from the ground up, and works on a few phone models from Treo, Palm, HTC and Motorola. The reference platform for OpenMoko is the Neo1973, manufactured by FIC (the initiators of the OpenMoko project). The final, consumer version is slated for release December 2007.
The current (GTA01) version of the phone lacks some key features (such as WiFi and Bluetooth) that will be present in the final product. The OpenMoko software itself is also currently in a “barely usable” state (pre-alpha) and is not recommended for end users. Otherwise, this looks like a very promising project, and a very sleek looking phone.
There are already a lot of applications and developer resources available for OpenMoko, as well as access to mailing lists and Subversion repositories. You can find active OpenMoko projects here.
4 Responses to “Opensource phone?”
I honestly can’t wait for opensource to hit mobile devices. I was looking at an opensource phone myself (could have been OpenMoko actually), but don’t think I’ll adopt one until a few more features are in place.
Like you, for the time being I love my n95.
My main gripe with the Neo is that it has no keypad really - unless it has handwriting recognition or something typing text messages on it will be a pain. So I am a bit partial to the QTopia phone. Also I love Trolltech, and have done a bit of work with QT - if I end up with a Neo I’ll probably install QTopia on it anyway :P
I really like the green phone and now MUST have it.
I do like my N95, mostly for the actually useful features and the no-nonsense Nokia approach. Some features still need some work, but considering the last software update already brought quite a few positive changes, I can only wait for further improvement.
With regards to the ‘no keypad’ on the Openmoko phone, I figure they will handle it similarly to the Apple iPhone. I recently held one in my hands and played with it for a couple of minutes and whilst the on-screen keyboard probably takes some getting used to, it was not a bad solution.