What are pros and cons of the different devel environments: qtopia, android, openmoko

Zeth Green zeth at zeth.net
Thu Jan 17 12:08:17 CET 2008


> So the questions remain: What features make you choose one over the other?
> And in particular, regarding Lorn's point below, how do you feel about 
> the different APIs?

I am a lurker in the Openmoko world at the moment. I am not a hardware person 
and my ideas for applications involve a functional GSM. So I had a play with 
the Qemu image but I am patiently waiting for GTA02/FreeRunner and will get 
into things properly in Easter or whenever you guys are happy with the 
hardware (no rush). I imagine there are many people in that position.

Back to the topic, I am interested in OpenMoko for two reasons. Firstly, and 
most importantly, as has been previously expressed, the current Android 
platform proposals and similar Linux phones such as motorola's own Linux
platform are thoroughly uninteresting to me so far, there are already a 
million phones that let you develop within the Java sandbox only. Do we really
need another one? Linux phones that in practice are less open than Symbian 
seem a step backwards to me.

For myself I like scripting languages, Python being my favourite, and I am 
hoping the OpenMoko will either come with some kind of scripting language or 
let me get one via the package manager. (I'm sure you guys have a plan for
this - as I said I am just a lurker so do not know all the details yet).

Secondly, 400Mhz and 128MB of RAM is a lot of power, it was not that long a go 
that a laptop would have that much power, and on such a machine I want free/
open source software that I can play with, i.e. this http://wiki.openmoko.org/images/2/28/Openmokoframework.png 
is in some senses a fulfilment of this: http://www.gnome.org/mobile/gmae-arch-diag.png 
which I think is a very good development because there are Python bindings to all of these things ;)

Best Wishes,
Zeth

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