Few questions regarding phone

[Mikko Rauhala]

ti, 2007-01-09 kello 12:42 -0800, Pranav Desai kirjoitti:
> I do have a few questions:

Even though I'm not in the dev team, I thought I'd field the bulk of the
questions based on publically available information, to keep the devs
deving ;] (Also, hence I'm the only one to blame if some of this
information is incorrect.)

> - Will this be a ready to use phone, out of the box ? as long as i
> have a sim card. 

Yes.

> - What is the final status on bluetooth. I have been reading that is
> there, not there ... 

There is no final status, at least none that they'd have us know yet :]
Reportedly some prototypes have BT chips, however this is no guarantee
of anything. Maybe those prototypes failed miserably, maybe not :]

> - What does it mean to be open source, will I be able to write my own
> "hello world" ? Can run a bash shell and a ssh client? Will I be able
> to run some sort of mobile firefox? or does it already have some
> browser.

You should be able to do stuff like this, plus modify most of the phone
software to your liking. You will need to add a microSD memory card if
you want to install a significant amount of addon software. Don't know
about the browser situation; Firefox is a bit big, but I suppose one
_could_ install a version of it (given a microSD); the GUI would need
some customizing a bit to fit. (Didn't the OLPC project do some work on
a leaner Firefoo? Maybe useful. Ah well.)

> - Will it have support for USB WiFi devices, since I assume there is
> no wifi in the initial version.

Should be workable, since OpenMoko runs a 2.6 Linux kernel with much of
its potential hardware support, however you'd need to power the WiFi
device externally since Neo's USB host will be unpowered.

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - mjr at iki.fi     - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist   - WTA member     - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>