Questions about Openmoko cellphones ..

[Al Johnson]

A few clarifications inline below:

On Thursday 04 June 2009, The Digital Pioneer wrote:
> 1. OM phones and their software are completely open source, so they can be
> hacked but not like motorolas. You can edit the source codes and complie as
> you see fit.

The hardware schematics and component placement are open too, so they even 
make it easy to hack the hardware. The bootloader is designed to allow new 
firmware to be flashed easily, and to boot from the SD card.

> 2. Android doesn't work completely;

The open parts of android mostly work, and work is in progress to fix the bits 
that don't. You can check the changelogs here:
	http://freerunner.android.koolu.com/release-files
Some of the android APIs, and apps that people think of as part of android, 
are closed and AFAIK won't run unless Google open them, or possibly recompiles 
them for armv4t

> 4. The phone can be dualbooted, but you're going to need a large enough
> microSD card to hold all the distros.

I'm quad- or quin-booting, I forget which, with android in NAND and 3 or 4 
others on an 8GB SD-card. That should be plenty big enough for android, qtopia 
and debian.

> AFAIK, that's all true, but I've been wrong before. ;)

Me too ;-)