FreeRunner delayed a further 6 months?!?!??

Matt Manjos matt at manjos.com
Sun Mar 16 16:23:09 CET 2008


On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Mark Haury <wolfmane at gmail.com> wrote:
> Marcin Juszkiewicz openembedded at haerwu.biz wrote on Sun Mar 16
>  11:02:12 CET 2008
>
>
>  On Saturday 15 of March 2008, Mark Haury wrote:
>   >> In order for there to be "competition", there has to be something
>   >> available. The Trolltech Greenphone comes to mind, though, as its
>   >> availability matches the Freerunner's at this point. Not to mention
>   >> that's the origin of Qtopia that everybody seems to be running on their
>   >> Neos rather than OpenMoko. That's more than a little revealing...>
>   >
>   >Greenphone is past now. Even Trolltech does not use it as developer
>   >platform - they switched to Neo1973 few months ago.
>
>  Exactly my point: the Greenphone hardware is *just* as available as Neo
>  hardware at this point, since both have been sold out for some time and
>  there's no telling when GTA02 might be available. And the fact that people
>
> are inclined to use Qtopia rather than Openmoko reveals something about the
>  the status of Openmoko...
>
>  The only difference between the Greenphone and the Neo at this point is that
>  Trolltech have publicly announced that the Greenphone is not going to be
>  produced anymore, whereas Openmoko keep promising (but not delivering) more
>  hardware. It's the *promise* of the resumption of production of hardware
>  that
>  keeps them actively developing Qtopia for the Neo.
>
>  It seems to me that continued production of the flawed GTA01 hardware would
>  have been preferable to nothing at all. And unless there's some extremely
>  serious problem with GTA02 that they're not telling us, they certainly could
>  have released it to developers before now. It is *abundantly* clear to
>  everyone that the software and probably the hardware is not ready for
>  consumer
>  release, but without allowing developers to evaluate and help, it never will
>  be. The core FIC-employed group is much too small to do it all by
>  themselves,
>  regardless of how brilliant and competent they are. It's not their technical
>  expertise that is being questioned, just their business sense.
>
>  It all boils down to the premise upon which this project is supposedly
>  based:
>  is it "open", or not?
>
>  Mark
>
>  P.S. If Nokia does in fact take over Trolltech as is rumored, this might all
>  be moot in short order. I warned a long time ago about the window of
>  opportunity...

I think the main concern with FIC at the moment is that if they
release the Freerunner developer-only hardware now, produced in 10x
the quantity of the 1973 (what was hinted to earlier), and some major
hardware problem was found, it could destroy the credibility and the
resources of the project. I hate waiting like this, and I was hoping
to get the Freerunner developer model for my birthday in a few weeks,
but I'd much rather wait and have the guarantee that I won't be SOL if
there is a problem with the function or the longevity of the device.




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