Will software compatible in google phone?

[Russell Sears]

Scottie wrote:
> Google phone seems to come out soon. Will you guys concern software
> compatibility between the pioneer neo1973 (which I can't get one from the
> market) and gphone from daily news paper?

Compatibility is a two way street.  Google has announced that it will 
open source the entire android stack, so it should be possible to port 
it to OpenMoko's hardware.   Android is supposed to support a wide range 
of hardware capabilities, so in theory, this will work well.

Running Openmoko code (or any other custom code) on the HTC Dream / 
T-Mobile G1 (the 'gphone') is a different story.

It runs android, but it sounds like the hardware has some ridiculous 
limitations:

  - You can only run software that you download from google.
 
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/radical-openness-on-the-google-phone-at-least-for-now/?hp

  - Android only supports java development out of the box, but OM's 
stuff is mostly written in C and Python, so you'll need to modify the 
android stack.  From what I can tell, you can't run modified versions of 
android on the G1 hardware.  I can't confirm this (and I've tried...), 
but it seems to be implied by the first limitation.  Also, from the 
Android faq:

"Q: Will Android run on <insert phone here>? A: No. There is currently 
only an Android SDK for the Windows, Mac OS X(intel), and Linux(i386) 
platforms.":

http://code.google.com/android/kb/general.html#runonphone

So, it sounds like if you want to download the android SDK, add the 
openmoko libraries and run it on your android phone, you're out of luck.

Instead, you'd need to jailbreak the android phone.  Then you could 
modify the firmware image to support OM's native (not java) software, or 
you could try to port the android SDK to the gphone, possibly by 
pirating binaries from the original firmware.  That'd be easier than 
(say) running OM's stuff on the iPhone, since you'd be starting with a 
working linux kernel.

Hopefully the android guys will produce an open phone some day...

-Rusty

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