Text messaging on the OpenMoko platform

[Jani-Matti Hätinen]

	Hi,

I just wanted to chime in on the discussion about IM support and text 
messaging in general. For clarity's sake I'll start a new thread with a 
relevant subject line.

First of all I'd like to say that, at least here in Finland integrated IM 
protocol support would be the killer application for a mobile phone. IM is 
pretty much ubiquitous among young people here, with MSN and IRC as the two 
major protocols used.
  That said, just slapping some kind of IM support onto a touchscreen phone 
isn't going to automatically turn it into the next must-have gadget. In fact, 
I'd daresay that people will have pretty steep expectations for something 
like this. Such as:

On the feature side:
 - Integration so that the used network platform becomes a minor detail and
   messages are organised in more relevant ways (as mentioned in this list
   earlier).
 - A UI which scales to a considerably higher number of messages and a
   considerably higher frequency of messaging events in comparison to current
   phones.
 - Support for as many messaging protocols as possible. (Jabber is nice, but
   in the real world no-one uses it and they most certainly aren't going to
   switch. I'd quess that the most important protocols are SMS, e-mail, MSN,
   IRC and AOL/ICQ, with Skype, Jabber/GoogleTalk and MMS being a bit
   less important)

On the input side:
 - An on-screen qwerty keyboard for two-thumb input in landscape orientation
 - A traditional on-screen phone keypad for one-thumb input in portrait
   orientation
 - Clear visual feedback of each keypress on both keyboards (the iPhone-style
   of showing a bigger pop-up above the button just pressed is a good starting
   point, possibly accompanied by some kind of halo effect)
 - A touchscreen and cpu which can keep up with kids' fingers (meaning
   something like 3-5 keypresses/second all with instant visual feedback)


P.S. Sorry about the earlier double posts. It seems that GMail has implemented 
a nifty new feature which silently deletes all incoming messages which have 
been sent through the same GMail account. (Thus meaning that the only way to 
see if my mails actually reach the list is to search through the archives or 
wait for someone to answer them)

-- 
Jani-Matti Hätinen