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Open Source Phone on the Way
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Feb 10, 2007 01:51 AM
from the can-you-hear-me dept.
from the can-you-hear-me dept.
prostoalex writes "Dr. Dobb's Journal reports on GPE Palmtop Environment's aim to create a full stack of open source software for mobile phones. Mobile operator Orange and France Telecom are contributing to the project. The goal is to have a fully featured mobile handset with applications like instant messaging and email, with only a portion of the price."
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"New" my foot. (Score:2, Informative)
Dup. And the first real Open Source effort. (Score:5, Interesting)
The GPE project is no exception. They are predated by about a couple of years by OpenEZX [openezx.org]. It appears to have been around since 2005.
GPE might be bringing more applications to the party. And more P.R.. But they just aren't the first.
Oh, and this article is basically a dup of the previous announcement: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/05/ 130208 [slashdot.org].
Granted, this is a reposting from Dr. Dobbs. But it's basically the same info.
Last year, it was Trolltech. And as you note, it isn't fully open. Furthermore, it's closed in arguably the most critical fashion. Namely, the device driver. Unfortunately, Trolltech selected a Broadcom chip. And if you've ever worked with Broadcom, this is a very bad sign. Their software quality sucks big time. So there are probably buffer overflows and other problems in the driver which just won't ever get fixed.
Then there have been the Java phones that have been touting BS about being an "Open Source" phone (one of them actually won an award a year ago as an "Open Source" phone at JavaOne). The only thing Open Source is the application layer, not the OS or the low level hardware. But again, each of them issues a Press Release proclaiming to be the first Open Source phone, and the media gobbles it up.
I've forgotten the other claims. But every 6-12 months, there's yet another group and another announcement.
So, yes, this is a lot of hoopla. And IMHO, it's a discredit to the GPE group to be making this noise. They should be honest if they want credibility.
But IMHO, this is all yesterday's news. The most interesting thing currently going on is the Open Source Software and HARDWARE effort being done by The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [slashdot.org]. The effort here is to release everything, including schematics, so that anyone can use COTS parts to build their own cellphone, from scratch.
But regardless of who was first, it is very nice to see all of these efforts going into finally opening up the cell phone market. This is a far cry from where things were 5 years ago.
Parent
Re:And then there's OpenMoko (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.openmoko.com/press/index.html#pictures [openmoko.com]
which is a truly open platform based on all GPL'd software.
The first hardware using OpenMoko, the Neo1973 Smartphone by Taiwan's FIC, will be available to the public soon.
http://planet.openmoko.org/ [openmoko.org]
Walter.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Inevitable Commodity Item (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Inevitable Commodity Item (Score:5, Funny)
That's just silly. Kids still know what a vinyl record and 8 track tapes are....Second thought strike that.
Parent
Call me Old Fashioned, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting thought (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm sure the NSA has nothing better to do but listen to your phone calls.
Seriously, I had no idea that half the population works for the NSA. They must because it would literally take half (or more) of the population to watch the other half.
Re:Interesting thought (Score:4, Informative)
Um... at least that's how I'd do it.
-nB
Parent
No not everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
i.e. who just happens to run a company competing with some company in some powerful senators state.
Re: (Score:2)
So, if the station processes your voice data-stream to further increase it's compression, you won't be able to apply any crypto to it.
Re: (Score:2)
You can use software to encrypt your conversations sent over packet data networks (in any of the various ways that this is achieved), but you cannot encrypt in hardware any conversations communicated according to the GSM/WCDMA standard.
Why not? Its uses the same speech codecs as commonly used in VoIP (EFR, AMR, AMR-WB), all you need to do is encrypt the data between speech encoding and sending the encoded data over the network. The only real difference between packet networks and cellular is that the tr
For more information... (Score:5, Funny)
Now a phone! (Score:4, Funny)
iPhone (Score:2, Interesting)
And let's not forget that an open source project many not be the first choice for a top-dollar piece of hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
reducing duplication of efforts? (Score:3, Informative)
This looks like a good thing, but I've noticed that there are several different similar efforts out there. There's Maemo for the Nokia tablets, OpenMoko for the Neo1973 (which is the closest I've seen to what I want in a phone), the Motorola Linux stuff, and this. I'm sure there will be some cross-pollination, but this seems like something that a consortium of phone makers or maybe Google could really push along quickly. How? Either by providing build servers which would build executables for the target environments, or providing emulators. Yeah, it's going to be hard to emulate the actual telecom functionality, but I think a majority of applications for these devices will not use those.
The reason I mentioned Google is that I believe they're doing something similar already, though a quick search didn't turn up what I remembered. IBM, Intel, or OSDN might be other good candidates.
Or are these different platforms using such different APIs for things like graphics toolkits that I'm smoking crack here?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Open source doesn't mean unlocked device. (Score:3, Informative)
source they have to give you, doesn't mean the device is "open" as in
you can change any binaries or config settings, add or remove software
etc. All the GPL forces them to do is to publish their source code
modifications / additions where it applies. It doesn't force them to
deliver the binaries on a device that allows modification of that code.
A phone ? No. (Score:2, Insightful)
the fact that it uses free software is irrelevant. But it is the big trend with some free software projects (gnome, GPE being some of them) to just copy, add no innovation but just say "hey we're free". A free copy of a bad idea will still be a bad idea.
An excellent idea (Score:2)
The only question I have is, would carriers really let a truly open source phone onto thier networks?
I'm also wondering what relation this might have (if any) with that Linux Greenphone...
Re:No opensource mobile phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully, Open software for phones will fall a "build it, and they will come" path. Coming from the US, I hate how every phone is branded to a particular company. You have to jump through hoops to unlock it to use with another provider, if it's even possible at all. The phones are almost always crippled, too - Verizon disables a lot of the Bluetooth functions on their phones unless you pay to unlock them. If you want a new software Feature X on your phone, you pretty much have to throw it out and buy a new one with Feature X on it. Buying a phone is a game where you have to choose between what you want and what you can live without. Choose carefully, because you're going to be stuck with the phone for two years unless you want to pay $500 for it to go month to month. It's total bullcrap.
It'd be really nice if companies would start rolling out phones designed to work on an open platform, like what FIC did with the Neo1973 [openmoko.com].
Parent
Working on it... (Score:2)
That would make me the third person to mention this so far. I have to say, I want one, but the lack of WiFi and EDGE is annoying, at the least. Space limitations may also be an issue. So, what I really want is the next version...
Correction... (Score:2)
Apparently Slashdot's "plain old text" now actively strips out HTML tags? Bad Slashdot. Bad.
I meant to say something like: "Looks like we already have something [openmoko.com]...."