[Shr-User] Alternatives to FR

Lowell Higley higleylh at gmail.com
Sun Jan 10 10:23:05 CET 2010


On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Marc-Olivier Barre
<marco at marcochapeau.org>wrote:

> On Sat, 9 Jan 2010 12:58:38 +0100, Lowell Higley <higleylh at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 2:12 AM, William Kenworthy
> > <billk at iinet.net.au>wrote:
> >
> >> What alternatives to the FR (with the same functionality) are there?  I
> >> want 3G phone/sms access and the FR doesnt cut it any more ...
> >>
> >>
> > Sorry to join the conversation so late but this is my favorite so far as
> a
> > FreeRunner replacement.  There should be a public developer release soon.
> > I'd guess (based on the pricing of the Zii Egg Dev kit) a dev kit would
> be a
> > little pricey (US$600 to US$800.)  Although considering an unlocked Nexus
> > One is US$530... maybe not.  All perspective I suppose.
> >
> > Zii Trinity <http://www.ziilabs.com/products/platforms/ziitrinity.aspx>
>
> Hi,
>
> First mail in a while that even catches my attention ! Thanks for that.
>
> Do you know if they provide open sourced drivers for their hardware ?
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Marc-Olivier Barre
> XMPP ID : marco at marcochapeau.org
> www.MarcOChapeau.org
> _______________________________________________
>

No problem.  This came to me over identi.ca and my jaw dropped the more
reading I did.

I don't have a real answer for you.  I've been trying to get into the dev
forums but they have some .asp issues with their site. But here is my best
guess. ZiiLabs is a wholly owned subsidary of Creative Labs. If I read their
propaganda correctly, they will support both android and their own version
of linux, plaszma.  It looks like they will provide tweaked versions of
android, drivers and middleware to the dev community.  So I would say that
no, the device drivers will not be open source.  I would say the developer
community would be provided with binary kernel modules. My best guess but
the official answer would have to come from ZiiLabs.  I'm also guessing a
dev NDA would be involved.  On the other side of the coin, engadget, gizmodo
and most of the gadget news sites keep speaking of the device as Open
Source... so you never know.

They seem to be actively looking for OEMs for this phone.  Perhaps one of
our FR distributors could inquire?  I'm considering dropping $400 on the Zii
Egg dev kit just to start playing with it.  I'd rather have the Trinity but
I am not sure how long that will take.
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