Discussion: what are your dreams for the Openmoko Community

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

> So what are your dreams with respect to open mobile handhelds?
I desesperately want an usable phone for my use case:
1) free software only on the main CPU.
2)reliable telephony:
---->Without a good SHR forwarder I can't use it at all, even if I forget 
about the other issues.
---->I also suspect that the CPU is at 1GHz instead of 800Mhz with the 3.2 
kernel in SHR, which makes the CPU overheat when it's at 100% too often which 
makes the phone shut down.

3)music playing in headphones by whatever means(bluetooth or wired, wired 
preferabily):
---->I still need to resolder correctly my headphones.
---->I would really like to install SHR on NAND to use my fat32 microsd but 
NAND isn't reliable, it only booted 1 of 2 times last time I tested:
->the time where it doesn't boot I've tons of ECC errors
->no errors at all when it boots fine.

4)reliable browsing without adds:
We(SHR) failed there too:
---->midori segfaults at startup
---->eve doesn't support add blocking
---->chromium doesn't support add-blocking
---->firefox segfault at startup
---->links -g segfault at startup

5)as a bonus: the ability to port applications to it(=>not android, GNU/Linux 
with an openembedded-based build system, SHR fits it).

6)as a second bonus: people writing cool applications for the device(like 
applications to use the sensor, privacy applications like sms encryption 
etc... basically a bit like what's in FDroid[1])

So beause of the forwarding issue I'm back to the gta02 even if it has 
suspend/resume issue(big issues).
Qtmoko wasn't really usable for me either(the volume is not loud enough for 
Italy(very noisy country)) so when I tried it I couldn't ear a thing from the 
remote person.

> What would you like as future hardware?
I just need an usable smartphone, I don't care that much about the hardware 
but an n900-like device(800x480 screen resolution and orientation+a keyboard) 
would be nice because it would make software fit better on the screen.
Since we don't have the manpower to fix all software to fit on the gta04 screen, 
why not adapt the phone instead?
some games(wesnoth,supertux etc...) work well with 800x480, and many 
applications were ported to that resolution for  the eeepc701.

> What to see in software
> distros? Anything else? 
> What missing piece are you waiting for?
A forwarder and more implications from the SHR developers that are "away and 
will come back one day"(tm).

The lack of implication from some SHR developers(not all:
some like Martin Jansa really do a good job, Simon Busch also do a very good 
job even if he's only a freesmartphone.org developper now) really annoyed me 
up to the point to made me quit SHR officially:
things didn't advance fast enough, and no one was there for helping me in some 
difficult tasks like the forwarding, which made me frustrate more and also take 
even more work, which creates a burn out... which makes people quit.
The quiting had a huge effect the week, everybody was on IRC and really worked 
on SHR and FSO, after but this week is kind of dead with only the usual 
minimal set of SHR developers(Martin Jansa)....

I really wonder what to do....maybe I should work on the forwarder again....

Denis.

[1] http://fdroid.org/