A Truly Open Linux Phone

skelator2821 writes to tell us about the debut of the OpenMoko, a Linux phone with GPS that is open from top to bottom. The device is set to debut to developers this month for $350, according to the article, but there is no detail on how to get your hands on one, and no link to the manufacturer (FIC). From the article: "This is the first phone in a long time to get us really interested in what it is, what it isn't, and the philosophy behind it. The philosophy is the thing that makes Linux great... it is really open. It runs the latest kernel, 2.6.18 as of a few weeks ago, and you can get software from a repository with apt-get."

Zaurus vs. This

I own a Sharp Zaurus, and aged as it might be, it pretty much keeps pace - absent the GSM bit.

Of course, I will buy.

No vendor lock-in? I don't think so

I doubt very much that carriers will be friendly towards open,hack-by-anybody, phones. Most/all carriers require all kinds of certification & testing before they allow vendors to hook up a phone to their network. They also don't like time wasters trying to hook up low volume/low profit phones to their networks. The testing can cost a big bunch of dollars -- ballpark $250k. Now if Joe hacker wnats to spend that, and he can convince the carrier he's going to sell many thousands, he's welcome. Otherwise, at least some part of the phone firmware will be locked down and tamper proof to keep ceritication valid.

Re:No vendor lock-in? I don't think so

Not the GSM vendors (Cingular and T-Mobil) - any unlocked phone with the appropriate SIM card will work on their networks.

Re:No vendor lock-in? I don't think so

You're absolutely right. I work for T-Mobile. As long as you have a handset that takes a SIM card, you can use any phone you like. We actually have a tech support department devoted to just helping people with unsupported devices. I help people all the time set up their GSM phones to use on our network (i.e. - internet and picture messaging). I believe Cingular is the same way...as is most of the rest of the world.

Absolutely so! Here's the state of the art

Well, you're just not familiar with what's going on in the Open Source Phone world.

First of all, the Carriers have little choice here. Fully functional Reference kits are available in the under $1000 range. For GSM, you can get them for about $200-300. These are the kits that companies who build cell-phones use to jumpstart their designs. So what's a Carrier going to do? Outlaw these? And kill development for cell-phones? I don't think so.

The most they might do is to tighten down on the registration. But that involves overhead and hassle. Unless these kits prove to be an issue, it's not going to happen; at least not with the GSM market. And not worldwide.

You are also wrong about the "time wasters" who supply low volume and low profit phones. What the Carriers want (at least some of them) is to sell the airtime. Some of these Carriers really don't care where it goes, as long as they get paid for it.

There's a whole resale market here which underscores the point. You want to to become your own cell-phone company? You can, if you have the money. And if you don't think *those* resellers are hungry, you're kidding yourself.

I admit that as far as the standard view about "time wasters" goes (for the big companies) you are correct. And it's explicitly been this attitude which has severely hindered innovation in the cell-phone market. There are a plethora of uses for small markets. Some of the hungrier carriers fully realize this, and are supportive of anything which will make them money.

Finally, the lockdown on GSM transceivers is a bit silly. The interface is extremely simple; it's a variation of the old Hayes Modem interface. I kid you not. "ATDT....". There's even an Open Source Project for this. Here's the link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libgsmc [sourceforge.net]

Finally, there's even a group dedicated to a fully Open Source phone. Namely, the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. They are having a meeting tomorrow night in San Francisco. Here's a link to their mailing list archives:

http://telefono.revejo.org/pipermail/svhmpc_telefo no.revejo.org/ [revejo.org]

Check out the list, and the information on various associated websites. There's really a groundswell building in this area. And those Carriers which close things off are going to miss an opportunity that their competitors are actively interested in.

Feeling like the codger I am

Why not make a 100$ one that simply, lets me make phone calls, and not much else? I don't care if the are Wifi. Or Wii. Im 34, and I'm over that.

Open Phone

So if it's an open phone... Does it come "Locked"?

New Linux Phones - Great!

OpenMoko does not yet return results on Google.

Yahoo shows 2 results for OpenMoko.

The $350 price tag is looking a lot better than the $600 tag attached to a similar Linux phone from D-Link.

two points

1. From TFA: Everything barring a few small drivers is GPL'ed.
   This is a joke, right? The drivers are probably the most important part of any piece of hardware, so calling this thing "open" but keeping drivers proprietary is ridiculous.
2. From the site: FIC recommends Windows(r) XP
   Yeah, and I am to buy a Linux product from you? Dream on...

Could you do GPS silliness?

if(!at_home && distance(get_current_location(), get_house_location()) lessthan FIFTYYARDS) ) {
FILE* mail = openMailStream([e-mail], "Hi honey!");
fprintf(mail, "I'm home!\n");
closeMailStream(mail);
at_home = true;
}

More details

... can be found on Linux Devices: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2986976174.html [linuxdevices.com] and also http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7056478804.html [linuxdevices.com]

WTF

When is this ITSATRAP shit going to end?

Yeah, I know it's off-topic

But, for the record, this was indeed tagged 'itsnotatrap' before 'itsatrap'.

Your efforts at countering today's 'itsatrap' initiative, while numerically significant, aren't really helping.

Throwback... it had to be done

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

No 3G/EDGE?

Sure it might be open, but you think there'd be some way to get more than just GPRS on these kind of phones? It's not as if GPRS is the only game in town for data, there's certainly no credible reason why it's omitted on these phones

Dimensions?

Does anyone have a clue about the dimensions of the thing? I currently own an old Sony-Ericsson T100 [esato.com] and most modern phones are way bigger and heavier. If it isn't, it might actually be an interesting gadget, since I've been annoyed by a couple of design choices made for my phone - a non-issue for an open-source phone...

Great phone

Looks great, has touchscreen, memorycard-slot, GPS, and even runs linux. If it only had a camera and a headphone-socket (is it really missing such a socket? I find that quite hard to believe), this would be the perfect phone I was always waiting for!

WiFi is important

Does it have Wifi? I think Wifi is really important, because while at a hotspot, like in your home, you could route your voice calls over VoIP. That would make it so much cheaper, and could be a killer app for Joe Average. I really think we ought to do this.

That said, I'll stand in line to get one of these, if the hardware is a bit rough. I'm sick and tired of my Sony Ericsson K700i, I've had it less than a year, and it is just totally borked allready. It is important that a phone can take a bit of beating.

Awesome!

Imagine encrypted SMS ?
Or encrypted voice conversations?

Imagine mapping/pinpointing locations and using the GPS to show your place, and have a map with bookmarked locations, to find a certain store on a certain street so you don't have to walk around lost not knowing where is what.

Yeah, but..

Does it run Linux?

flashing?

Can it be reflashed? TFA does not mention it. Will the firmware for the baseband and the AGPS be provided along with code?

Mobile OS market

Belongs to Symbian! But yeah I'm all in for competition, however I don't think Linux or Windows can beat Symbian in this area.

Already been done Motorola A780

The Motorola A780 (about 2 years old) has integrated GPS and runs the Linux Kernel and a heavy Linux filesystem. Its got the camera/mp3 player/GPRS-EDGE/320x240 color screen/Blue Tooth/microSD slot/USB blah blah blah... Its really cool. I finally got one, but only the European version has the integrated GPS. So I had to order it through ebay.co.uk and find someone willing to ship to the US. It even came with CoPilot preinstalled so you can really use the GPS functionality.

Why it isn't for sale in the US is beyond me, but I'm sure there is some Motorola/Microsoft politics going on. There's a community of Linux activists hacking the phone and Motorola offers the source downloadable from their website. In short this product exists and works well.

This recent announcement looks like vapor hardware. All the 'pictures' are CAD renderings. If you want it now, you can get it now. Though, unless you're in Europe, expect to work hard to get it.

Re:two points

Finally someone who's not calling me a dumb-ass first thing in the morning over this issue :-) I agree, it's a step in the right direction, though not a very big one (the drivers are what's most important to a cellphone, so that's why I find it a joke in this case). And when the words "completely open" are involved I naturally argue semantics, because that's all it is :-)

Re:Now only if it supported..

If you read the article it does say that wifi is planned for a future release of the hardware.

Re:Now only if it supported..

RTFA. They're considering it for the next version, so they probably have realized it.

Re:Is it just me or what?

Yup. Just like ethernet is becoming the new AT&T.

Your analogy sucks. You are an idiot.

Re:No Camera...

"Do one thing and do it well" -- now where have I heard that before?

I'm willing to bet there are more than a few ways to extend this to include all the little goodies you can imagine.

What the hell are you talking about?

It can do ANYTHING, because it runs Linux. It's GSM so it can send and receive text messages like anything else. It can do web browsing, IRC, VOIP, whatever else you want, because it runs Linux.

What else are you looking for? What can your "cheap candy bar Nokia" do that this can't?

The reason this will be outlawed by cell phone carriers is precisely because it can do anything... because it runs Linux. Anything that loosens their ironclad control over handsets is verboten.

Re:um, ok

Also, I want to smack all the people using the tag "itsnotatrap" when they know, if they read the tagging FAQ, that it should be "!itsatrap".

Re:No Camera...

No Camera...no headphone socket, no memory card socket, not enough memory to be a great mp3 or video player.

OK, no camera, but that's what my DSLR [slashdot.org] is for.

Headphones: use bluetooth, perhaps?
Memory slot: What's that MicroSD thingy?

Sounds good to me...except maybe the touch screen---tactile controls are really hard to beat.

Re:No Camera...

> no memory card socket

what?

Let's step back and look at what the phone itself is before we get into the software that runs on it. The hardware itself is a Samsung 2410 266MHz ARM9 with a 2.8-inch VGA touch screen. There are only two buttons on the phone, the rest is handled by the touch screen, a microSD slot, Bluetooth 2.0, and USB for connectivity and charging. It also has two 1W stereo speakers so you can repurpose it to an MP3 player or anything else you would like.

your wrong about the lack of memory.

I don't care about the camera. I never seen much of a point to a camera phone. Makes about as much sense as a mp3 playing bathtub, which I am sure somebody somewere made.
Sure it's convient, but so what?

And your absolutely wrong about not having enough memory. It takes miniSD cards and has 128 megs of RAM. Right now I have 2 1gig miniSD cards and a 128 meg SD card. Also you can buy up to 4gig MiniSD cards.

So frankly with miniSD slot your disk space is practically UNLIMITED.

For instance many possibilities:

* Go the 'Slax' route. Slax is a customizable Live Linux cdrom. It has various modules that you can use that you can add-on applications and other things to a already existing live cdrom. You can do this because the modules are compressed read-only file systems and you use UnionFS to mount them over the existing file system transparently. You can mix and match applications in that manner.

You can do the same thing with this. No problem.

So other possibilities.
* Remote X11 applications. Need I say more? (and yes NX compression will make them perfectly usable)
* Simple games.
* VoIP.
* remote access of systems through a veriaty of means such as voice command, terminal, tones.
* 266mhz CPU is fast enough for video.
* GPS kicks-ass. Interact with other GPS systems and keep track of things via GPSD and such.
* secure encrypted file systems for passwords and other sensitive information.
* stream audio

What this thing is is a Linux PC that fits in your pocket. Pretty much anything you can do with a PC linux box you can do with this thing.

This thing literally kicks the shit out of any sort of propriatory hardware phone you can think of. Even with out the camera. The possiblities are endless.

Re:your wrong about the lack of memory.

MiniSD != MicroSD For Comparison...
MiniSD:
|-----------|
MicroSD:
|----|

Re:No Camera...

Sounds perfect :)

Re:No Camera...

no headphone socket

Well, it'll have bluetooth 2.0, and I believe bluez has A2DP support.

no memory card socket

According to the article, it'll have a microSD slot.

not enough memory to be a great mp3 or video player

With 128 MB of RAM, it's got plenty to play mp3s. Video probably depends on whether or not there's a DSP.

Re:No Camera...

Funny, maybe I'm old, but the only thing I was really worried about was whether or not it was a good phone.

Headphone socket aside, I've already got all that other stuff. Why would I want to pay more for one piece of hardware that will probably do all of them poorly?

Re:No Camera...

Pretty much any 'phone made in the last five years is a good 'phone. There are some exceptions, but not many. Once you've got the 'good 'phone' part solved, the question is 'what can we do with all the spare CPU power we have on this machine?'

An address book is obvious; you need to store 'phone numbers anyway, so it's not much of a stretch to store the rest of the contact information. Add in IrDA or Bluetooth so you can trivially send vCards to other people and it's a useful feature. If someone asks for a friend or colleague's contact details you can hand them a virtual business card.

Since you need to sync the address book with a computer, you may as well sync calendar information as well. I have my 'phone with me more often than my computer and so being able to have calendar alarms on the 'phone instead of the computer is great.

A camera? I wasn't convinced by this one until I got a camera-phone. I hadn't owned a camera for quite a while and didn't see the point in getting one. But then I found out that having a camera that took reasonable (2 megapixel - not fantastic, but not bad) quality pictures in my pocket all the time meant I actually used it.

A media player would be useful for the times I don't want to carry my iPod, except that the included headphone have sharp corners which hurt my ears and Nokia insist on a proprietary headphone socket.

I can't remember what other features my 'phone has, but if they don't take up any UI space (and they don't, since I have a set of shortcuts to the features I actually use) then they don't bother me. Mass production brings the price down.

Some hardware details...

glommed from the net...

Neo1973 Handset Hardware

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. "Maps look stunning on this screen," 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's quad-band GSM/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 "AT" 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 notes that the FIC-GTA001, or Neo1973, is merely the first model in a planned family of open Linux phones from FIC. He expects a follow-up model to offer both WiFi and Bluetooth. "By the time one ships, the next one is half done," he says.

Re:No Camera...

According to the article it has a microSD slot.

Its also got bluetooth which should slightly offset the lack of a headphone socket (except for playing MP3's which you seem to be interested in).

While I'm not big on WiFi, it certainly would have made sense for this thing. A nice app to search for and alert if any open wireless is available, so you can kick off voip would definately underscore the power of an open platform.

Re:um, ok

itscrap

  Oh great, another tag meme. ;-)

snarkd

Re:care to visit the company website?

FIC got lots of free advertising from Microsoft for that blurb.

Besides, you can recommend Windows XP and still be OSS friendly, despite what some idiots think. Some people actually need to use the best tool for the job.

Re:No Camera...

The screen is far too small on a cell phone to play movies. Watching a full-length movie would be really painful. I might occassionally watch "guy gets hit by a pie on youtube" on my cell phone, but hardly more than that. And you don't need massive disk space to do that.

Proper quality headphones are bigger than the entire size of the cell phone. Having a headphone jack is therefore somewhat irrelevant. If I wanted an iPod, I'd buy that, and throw it in the duffel bag with my regular size headphones. What's that, you say? You use crappy lo-fi "ear buds" that let everyone else hear what you're listening to? Well, the built-in speaker should be fine for you.

As far as the camera feature goes... I already have a camera which is much, much better than any camera on a phone. I can see using the cell phone camera in emergency situations where you absolutely have to take a picture of something. But aside from that, it is pretty much useless.

Also, there is a memory card socket FYI.

Re:No Camera...

Bluetooth. Just sync up a ear danglers for headphone+mic. Sync up stereo headphones for mp3 playing, sync up any bluetooth camera.

Id likely get one or two.

Draco

It's just you.

It seems to me that trolls are becoming the new Slashdotters.

Re:No Camera...

This is hilarious. The original post contains three facts, one of which is simply wrong (there is a memory card socket) one of which is irrelevant (no headphone jack, but it supports bluetooth headsets, which are better) along with one assertion (not enough memory to be an mp3 or video player) which is either a conclusion based on the wrong fact or a ridiculous assertion that 128MB is too small to fit a player into.

So basically, the post contains 75% misinformation, and the information it does contain is painfully obvious.

And it's still +5 insightful.

Prediction:

This will never be available in the United States.

Purchase of it and use of it on U.S. GM networks will be punishable by death.

(I'm only half kidding)

Re:No Camera...

According to this [linuxdevices.com] the phone will accept MicroSD cards, also lets not forget it has bluetooth, so you could use a bluetooth stereo headset if you're so inclined. I'm tempted by the GPS myself.

Re:No Camera...

So Andy... what is the SD slot for?

How about this: no headphone socket and no camera.

I have a iPod and DSLR this doesn't sound like a problem to me.