Adding an overview page to openmoko.{com,org}

[michael at michaelshiloh.com]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:

> On Tuesday 21 November 2006 19:30, Corey wrote:
>> to hear: "Open phone, runs whatever I can dream up of developing or
>> installing! I want it now. Wait, it has no wifi? No bluetooth? Well what
>> the heck am I supposed to _do_ with it?". A huge segment of this phone's
>> potential market is going to immediately loose interest in dissapointment.
>>
> I agree. Most reviews of smartphones these days bash even conventional ones
> that don't come with UMTS AND WiFi but if you neither have 3G nor WiFi nor
> Bluetooth reviews will look very weak ("Honestly, a GPS phone that cant use a
> bluetooth headset?"). Personally I'd much prefer WiFi to BT anyway.
>
> A big part of being open is having the ability to talk to the rest of the
> world. At current GPRS pricing in most of the world that simply isn't viable
> without local area wireless (WiFi preferred). Take that away and open
> suddenly isn't very useful to many anymore.

i agree that wifi and BT are extremely desireable, but i wouldn't go so far as
to say "open suddenly isn't very useful to many anymore". they are mostly
orthogonal. an open phone is important and interesting right now for a great
many reasons. this field is still in its infancy and there is much groundwork
to be done that can be started with the current hardware. when a version comes
out with wifi and BT (hopefully really soon) we'll have much infrastructure in
place and will be able to take advantage of those new features more quickly.

as a hardware guy, i prefer to see limited hardware sooner, rather than a long
lead time to the perfect platform. we will learn things with the limited
hardware which will inform the design and feature set of the later version.
the down side of course is cost.

michael