[Android] Converting a brick into a phone

Rui Castro rui.castro at gmail.com
Wed Dec 10 14:58:43 CET 2008


Hi,

Like many people in this community I have my Neo resting comfortably
in my desk because there isn't a stable OS with the basic phone
funcionalities available at the moment (I already tried all the
distributions available). Some distributions provide some of the basic
stuff, but they're not reliable in many ways.

Today I read a message from Wolfgang Spraul in the thread about the
end of the Optimization Team that got me worried "The way things are
going right now, we will probably have this release mid-next year.".
Well, I think this is very bad. Electronic equipment, like
phones/computers, become outdated in a very short period of time
(GTA03 is already being created). By the mid-next year Neo will be
pretty much an old phone and nobody really used it, yet.

I think Android is the best candidate to turn the Neo into a daily
usable phone right away. It has all the basic (and not so basic)
applications, it has a good usability, good looks and the number of
users/applications will grow very rapidly in the next months, I
think.
The current state of the Android port for Neo is already very
encoraging and with a little effort from the community (and Openmoko
people) Android could be fully functional in the Freerunner in a
couple of weeks.

Sean McNeil has been doing a great work, but as I see it, he is
basically the only one working on the low level problems. My personal
experience is more at the application level (Java), but with a little
guidance I'm willing to help in any way.

What I  would like to see is some sort of list of things to do and how
could the people from the community help doing them.

I don't have much experience with open-souce projects, maybe I'm the
only one that doesn't know how to help. If this is the case, please
forgive this message :)

Best regards,
Rui




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