what is the difference between openMoko and windows mobile based phones

[Andreas Kostyrka]

* hank williams <hank777 at gmail.com> [070118 14:01]:
>      Beside the point that an *average* user doesn't see the potential of
>      open source on a mobile - what are your experiances and demands on
>      a smart phone?
> 
>      When you look at the devices that you know or use(d):
>      - What does you miss most?
>      - What does you hate most?
>      - What does you like/used most?
> 
>    well honestly my biggest issue with phones in general is not features but
>    execution. The iPhone is a good example of executing  well on features
>    that have been around  for years. My one concern with open source is that
>    it is great at delivering features, but historically not great at UI. This
>    is because big open source projects are often done by teams where everyone
>    can do what they want. This tends to mean there is no singular unified
>    design vision. This is fine for features for the most part because we can
That's technically speaking an out-of-date vision of opensource
develepment. I wouldn't consider KDE inconsistent. actually, one might
argue that KDE does better then Windows based environments on this
score.

>    all more or less agree on how to implement wifi or an encryption scheme or
>    whatever. Or if we disagree we can implement five different ways as APIs
>    and let the market decide. But good UI doesn't work that way.
I guess you haven't used the embedded Linux UIs. They are more
consistent then some commercial phones.
> 
>    So the iPhone has a design czar - jobs - and that means that forward
>    thinking design gets done in a unified way. This issue may not effect
nope. You are assuming that it will be executed well. nobody has seen
an iphone for long enough to fool around with it.

>From seeing the details, the iPhone is something that not even my wife
will want to have, everything that I've seen till now suggests that it
will be a nice (smart)phone, but not necessarily nicer than better
existing phones, with an iPod embedded.

And it will put the carriers interests in front of the users interests.

>    OpenMoko, at least in the beginning, since a private company is doing the
>    design. But when the design process becomes public, the features and
>    design by committee thing might be an issue.

It's the Linux-will-fork story all over. Empirical evidence suggests
that your fear won't happen.

> 
>    But the bottom line is that my biggest problem with phones is that they
>    are just not designed well. The pretty much all suck!
Well, that's not helpful. Design a better, give hints, improvement
ideas. It's hard to give you the perfect phone, because you don't
specify what you want.

Andreas