Is Neo1973 truly abandoned?
John Locke
mail at freelock.com
Thu Aug 14 20:03:43 CEST 2008
Wow. Just. Wow.
After being heads down on other projects for a while, I check in on the
web site and read:
> Note that the Neo 1973 can not currently run the OM 2008.8 software
> (the latest release), and that there are no immediate plans to make
> that happen. Users should instead purchase a Freerunner if they wish
> to participate in the Openmoko community.
(http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GTA01:Neo_1973)
... and then I find a message to the list from Wolfgang at OpenMoko, saying:
> I am only aware of 1 (ONE) functioning GTA01 in the Taipei office. A
> bit hard to do development and testing that way.
> Next week we will look at the Om 2008.8 on GTA01 situation:
>
> 1. how many people want this?
>
>
How many GTA01s did you sell? Gotta be a few thousand. I'm sure we all
bought them assuming *someday* we'd have a usable phone. Right now, I
have a usable GPS, thanks to TangoGPS, other than the fact that the
battery dies before I finish most of my hikes (making it useless as a
GPS, too, other than for novelty value).
When I got the GTA01, I assumed that someday it would be usable as a PDA
and phone, and could hand off to my wife and then get a GTA02. Instead,
I essentially have a $350 paperweight.
So when GTA03 comes out, does GTA02 get abandoned?
I'd say, the minimum that we need for GTA01 would:
1. have working, reliable GSM service to use as a phone
2. have working, reliable suspend/resume so that you can get more than 4
hours at a time, without breaking the other features
3. provide working SMS,
4. have an address book, and calendar in some form that can be
synchronized with desktop/online services
5. have a GPS/mapping software that works.
So as best I can tell, we have 4 out of 5, but not even in any
combination that can be run together.
Can we at least get 1 to 4 done in some core release, so we can call it
a phone?
--
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com
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