>Do you use FR as your daily/primary phone? Not anymore. I did for several months.
>Do you use FR as your primary PDA? Yes, I still find it to be a wonderfully fun GPS-enabled PDA. I just got an N900, and I was quite surprised to find that the Freerunner's display is nicer. The N900 has 25% more pixels, but the Freerunner's display is brighter, and seems to have higher contrast. >What distribution you run most of the time? SHR-u My two cents: If I were dictator of the gta02-core team (instead of someone who doesn't even contribute), I would repurpose the device as a GPS PDA. I would remove all the radio components except for the WiFi, and try to optimize for the longest battery life possible. Those of us who have been following the Openmoko phones since before the release of the gta01 will remember that Sean Moss-Pultz use to give presentations in which one of the slides said that one of his big itches, one of the things that lead him to work on a phone, was the desire to be able to execute [quote] An adaptation of my favorite command in all of computing root> apt-get install [end quote] Many of us read or heard those words and were hooked. But the cell phone world has changed dramatically since the introduction of the gta01. When the gta01 was announced, GPS hardware was quite rare in a phone (the first generation iPhone didn't have it, for example), and those few phones which did have it had often been intentionally crippled by the wireless service providers (at least in the US), so that they could offer additional-fee location based "services" which were uniformly terrible. Needless to say, third parties were not encouraged to write GPS enabled software for those phones. Today, it goes without saying that any new smartphone will have GPS, and on many platforms, application developers have access to the GPS information. Today, you can buy an N900 from Nokia, and "apt-get install ..." will work like a charm. Nokia allows the user to run as root. Their OS on that phone is pretty familiar to Debian users. I know that many of the critical components on that phone are closed, and that owners are at the mercy of Nokia's decision as to whether or not to support new kernel releases, etc. But on the other side of the equation, the phone works well now, is 3G-enabled, has a good camera, has an audio system that does not clip bass frequencies, has USB 2 rather than 1.1, has a much faster processor, an FM transmitter/receiver, more RAM, GSM quad-band (not tri-band), etc., ad nausium. My point is not to be a shill for Nokia (though I'm sure that's exactly what I sound like), but rather to point out that there is really no hope at that a group of people such as the gta02-core team, working part time with no large corporate sponsor, will ever produce a product with hardware on a par with what the big players are contemporaneously offering. That wasn't really as clear when the gta01 was offered. It had hardware that was better than average in some respects (GPS, high resolution display), and worse than average in others (CPU and connectivity). The gta01 could hold its own against a Treo. I don't think we'll see an openmoko phone that can hold its own against a modern smartphone. In software too, the situation has changed dramatically. When the gta01 was announced, other smartphones were running terrible OSs like PalmOS, or early versions of whatever the hell Microsoft was calling Windows CE that week. Now there's WebOS, Android, Maemo and OS X availble on phones, all based on some Unix-like OS. Are they free? No. But they aren't simply hopeless for multi tasking like PalmOS was. I'm sure there are people reading this who won't care about that. The mere fact that there are many people reading this mailing list who still care about the Freerunner, even though they don't use it as their "real phone" is a testiment to the loyalty of the openmoko community, and how much we all wanted the Freerunner to succeed. If a gta02-core or gta03 phone is ever offered for sale to the general public, I'll buy one. But I don't think there is any chance at all that such a phone will sell even at the volume the Freerunner did. And that was not enough to keep Openmoko Co. in the phone business. If you read the posts to this list that were made shortly after the Freerunner went on sale, it's clear that the phone was bought by some people who really just wanted a high-end smartphone, and who were not geeks who enjoyed reading about ALSA files on the wiki site. The IRC channel was a lively beehive, with participants of widely varying skills. If another openmoko phone ever goes on sale, I predict it will be bought only by the most fanatic FOSS enthusiasts. In contrast, I think there still might be an unexploited niche in the GPS-PDA arena. Everyone knows the Freerunner has excited geocachers, hikers, bikers, etc. I don't know of any company such as Garmin or Magellen offering a GPS unit which is hacker-freindly and linux based. When you're hiking, you very often can't get a GSM signal anyway, so who would care if the GPS unit they had was a cell phone too? What if the gta03 had no phone hardware, an excellent GPS subsystem, an electronic paper display, and wonderful battery life? I think *that* would be a much more exciting product than any realistically possible gta03 phone, and a more tractible engineering project too. Ken Young _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community