T-Mobile with ASU on GTA01?

[Wolfgang Spraul]

Dear Marcus,
your mail touches many subjects and let me just pick out a few:

First of all thanks for buying 4 phones from us! We are still an 'Open  
Source project' more than a company and people need to believe in the  
bigger picture to buy from us now.

Believe it or not - we all eat our own dog food. You cannot believe  
how many mails Steve wrote to me complaining about his broken/buggy/ 
unchargeable/etc. Neo.
I admit that I am carrying two phones around with me, a Blackberry and  
a Neo.
Want to replace the Blackberry but we are not there yet.

> dogfood, i.e. using the Neo as their daily phone, things like
> oszillating GSM modems, non working GPS, SIM cards, deep discharge
> batteries, noisy headsets would have been since long ironed out.

Exactly our top priorities. I am amazed by how closely you are  
watching what's going on with Openmoko.
Let me just clarify this: We are not (knowingly) shipping defective  
products.
Our complete production testing software is under GPL now (http://git.openmoko.org/?p=system-test-suite.git;a=summary 
)
Every peripheral of every phone is tested in the factory.
(BTW, we are trying to open this up more, with open factory statistics  
etc. But that's a long-term goal)

So some people see bugs. All the things you list above.
In certain situations, certain countries, with certain GSM base  
stations, certain SIM cards, etc. etc.
And after months and months of improving the Neo, we decided to start  
shipping. Get more Neos out into real life, get more customer feedback.
Because in the end that's the only thing that can really focus the  
whole company.
Engineers are self-loving animals sometimes. Do not over-estimate the  
power Sean or me or Steve have over some of these guys.
But when the mailing lists have people who paid money for their  
phones, everybody will listen.

Openmoko is different, we do all this openly.
If you want to return your two non-working phones, I'm sure we find a  
solution. We will absolutely make sure that you get two fully  
functioning phones in return.
Hope this helps (a bit, I know you still have 2 phones with broken GSM  
as you say), keep us honest :-)
Best Regards,
Wolfgang

On Jul 9, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Marcus Bauer wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 09:25 +0200, thomasg wrote:
>> ASU works basically, but getting telephony work with it is a matter  
>> of
>> luck.
>> Mostly it doesn't work at all, mostly the qtopia phoneserver eats 90%
>> CPU..
>
> You may have one of the broken GSM modems. From my four phones two  
> have
> a broken GSM - that's 50%.
>
> They constantly reconnect to the cell tower and inbetween the can't  
> make
> phone calls and loose the GPRS connection but without notifying the
> pppd.
>
> This is the same with the mature OM2007.2 images as well as with the
> professionally by Trolltech developed pure qtopia images, the ASU  
> images
> the the new hyped FSO images.
>
>
> This is another hardware problem which is shared with the Neo 1973 and
> thus known since a year. The answer by Dr. Michael Lauer was "Guys,  
> this
> is a Heisenbug. We pray that it does not occur too often in the  
> field.".
>
> That is a very interesting engineering approach...
>
>
> The bug in question is:
> http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024
>
>
> The big problem with Openmoko is this "not invented here" mentality.  
> The
> OM2007.2 images were working well, GTK is a valid platform for mobile
> gadgets (see Nokia N700, N800, N810), you can add "bling" (see  
> clutter)
> and there is a huge developer base. The qtopia port to X adds a second
> huge developer base.
>
> But instead of going on and having a base for testing the hardware,
> there came this change to ASU and etk which probably 0.1% of Linux
> developers use. And despite what Lauer & Co try to make us believe,  
> this
> alienates GTK and qt developers. Just look on the planets of KDE and
> GNOME - nearly no mentionings. The developer mailing list: a big void.
>
> But the real problem here is that basically due to this reinventing  
> the
> wheel with ASU nobody inside Openmoko has ever really used the phones
> thus plenty of things which could have come up simply got lost. If  
> Sean,
> Wolfgang and Steve would have started to exclusivly eat their own
> dogfood, i.e. using the Neo as their daily phone, things like
> oszillating GSM modems, non working GPS, SIM cards, deep discharge
> batteries, noisy headsets would have been since long ironed out.
>
> Before now all the fanbois jump onto me and accuse me of trolling:
> in order to come to some lifestyle competitor of Apple the important
> thing is that the basics work and that they work reliably. Accepting
> brokeness as part of freedom is doing a disservice to the free  
> software
> world.
>
> And it is even more unacceptable as there were 5000 people buying a  
> Neo
> 1973 more or less for nothing. They all would have been more than  
> happy
> to participate in advancing the Neo.
>
> The point being: the Neo *is* a fantastic concept. Bring it there.  
> Stop
> ASU, concentrate on the basics, get the gtk and qt communities in.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community