Openmoko and the Neo FreeRunner
by Steen Nielsen on 06.08.08
Besides my passion for web development, I have a soft spot for open source software and the development of such. I admire the effort and the commitment a whole community of several hundred or maybe thousands of developers, designers, testers and users can put into projects, that would normally be impossible or need a great financial funding.
Phones and open source
Openmoko is one of these thousands of projects. Its purpose is to deliver a mobile phone with an open source software stack. Giving its community the freedom of shaping a mobile device, which the community wants, instead of doing as a lot of other companies, who makes a mobile with what the company thinks that their users want.
Although the phone is shipping. It is not yet considered good enough for the public. It is still mainly for developers, who wish to contribute to the project and/or help make the software, and even the hardware, better. The community have several ways of communicating, whereas the main resource is the wiki pages (wiki.openmoko.org). On the wiki pages, everything is being documented as much as possible as soon as possible.
The development process
I've been following the entire project closely for the past couple of years, tried to contribute on the wiki, but without a device, it wasn't much I could help with. October 2007, Openmoko finally released the Neo 1973, the first really open mobile phone. It had a lot of problems, which was all expected, by both Openmoko and the community.
Now I'm not going to go further into details of the Neo 1973. Openmoko have plenty of documents about the Neo 1973 on their website. The reason for this blog entry is simply that I've bought the new revision, the Neo FreeRunner. AndI must say that I am positive towards this project. It is not quite done yet, actually it's not at all done yet. But every day there's new features and patches for incorrectly working features.
It is incredible to sit there with a phone that you know, you can help develop or really screw up (all depending on your skills). In a couple of days Openmoko will change the default OS (Operating System). Actually it's already possible to download the new OS, but officially it is released on 8th of August 2008 (which makes a nice date of 08.08.08) and the name of the OS have changed from the working title, ASU (April/August Software Update), to the official release name Openmoko2008.8. the current/old OS name is Openmoko2007.2, and there are a lot of changes to the layout and the entire core of the OS, which you can see on the respective pages above. There are also lots of photos on the wiki pages, for all those curious about the user interface.
You can count on me returning with more goodies about the Neo FreeRunner later on.