Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

PocketCHIP can also be turned into a cell phone, don't forget. That actually might be the most promising alternative of them all ..

You have to give attribution of some of the concepts behind the first iPhone to this project. I remember when the iPhone was unveiled, I immediately thought it was a better funded, better polished clone of Openmoko.

Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was almost identical: http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-...

Openmoko was also promoting the "app store" concept much earlier than Apple, which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone.

From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was before the iPhone was unveiled):

"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 adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "

My freerunner is somewhere in my old computerstuff bin, but the idea of having a completely open phone is still something I'm interested in.

They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock solid calling and wifi. It's actually only recently (last year) that I moved to a smart phone, otherwise I'd happily support an open phone.

Also, I believe the freerunner was not 100% open. My recollection was that both the GSM driver (either firmware or device driver) and the graphics driver (openmoko was unable to open up the source to the device driver although they tried) were closed.

Well i witnessed more than one project just up and dump any pretext of supporting KDE3 once KDE4 was announced.

If the APIs were stable, there would not be a need to drop one for the other.

Look at the kernel, there have never been a situation where one have to go "sorry, but i only support X+1 from now on".

Similarly, until the 64-bit version, and that in turn was because of hardware not software, one could run binaries from Windows 3.0 (at least) on present day Windows.

That is the kind of stability i am talking about. That is the kind of stability that get third parties to stay with a platform.

The PC market is devolving into something where you can't do any of that anymore either, with non-upgradeable devices like the Apple MacBooks or quite sealed things like the Microsoft Surface products. And average users don't seem to mind.

Maybe it's a subjective thing, but it feels to me like we've actually taken several steps back in the last 5 years or so.