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

[Tim Knapp]

Hi Zeth,

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 11:08 +0000, Zeth Green wrote:
> > 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).

I'm a python fan too:

ipkg install python-core

gives you python 2.5!!

This is what I've currently got on my OM:
libpython2.5-1.0 - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Programming Language
python-codecs - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Codecs, Encodings & i18n Support
python-core - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Interpreter and core modules (needed!)
python-fcntl - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python's fcntl Interface
python-io - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Low-Level I/O
python-lang - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Low-Level Language Support
python-math - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Math Support
python-misc - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Programming Language
python-pickle - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Persistence Support
python-pycairo - 1.4.0-ml0 - Python Bindings for the Cairo canvas
library
python-pygobject - 2.12.3-r3 - Python GObject bindings
python-pygtk - 2.10.4-ml5 - Python GTK+ 2.10.x Bindings
python-re - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Regular Expression APIs
python-readline - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Readline Support
python-shell - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Shell-Like Functionality
python-subprocess - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Subprocess Support
python-threading - 2.5.1-ml6 - Python Threading & Synchronization
Support

-Tim

> 
> 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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