[sf-lug] Now is the Time to hate Apple?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Blake Haggerty (Blake.Haggerty at Sapphire.com):

> What about Neo Freerunner Openmoko? 
> http://www.openmoko.com/freerunner.html

Sadly a dead project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner

When the OpenMoko, Inc. company abandoned the project a year ago, it was
a promising 2.5G-class GSM phone (i.e., not full 3G[1]) with a
not-ready-for-prime-time developer firmware build with some severe
ergonomic problems, e.g., they hadn't yet done the power-management
optimisation, such that battery life remained absymal.[2]  

Now that I'm no longer relying on my Neo Freerunner GTA02 for telephone
service, I might see if one of the non-OpenMoko firmware builds, such as
Qt Extended (formerly Qtopia) or one of the Android ports is less
twitchy and more practical on it.


[1] Third-generation cellular data service entails adaptive use of
cellular frequencies to maximise available speech and data rates.
See:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G   Because the OpenMoko developers
had only a certain amount of bargaining power with chip vendors over the
latter's insistence on keeping hardware interfaces a secret, the company
had to use a radio chipset not capable of full 3G operation in order to
keep the amount of proprietary binary-only code to a bare minimum.

[2] This was a reasonable judgement call for a development-level build,
letting the developers concentrate on key problems in other areas first.