<span class="gmail_quote">On 9/7/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:jjh@megalomanic.net">jjh@megalomanic.net</a></b> <<a href="mailto:jjh@megalomanic.net">jjh@megalomanic.net</a>> wrote:</span><br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>The iPhone killer, competitor, or comparisons you have been describing - to<br>me - should not be done against the neo. The iPhone killer will be a later<br>model OpenMoko phone brought out after much custom development and
<br>innovative ideas are done against the Neo1973. The basic production<br>Neo1973 is what will begin the end of the iPhone - and all other phones -<br>but it is not going to be released as "the one" (pun!) ready to do it. It
<br>will take some time and community innovation for the neo to be a "killer<br>phone".</blockquote><div><br><br>It's truly unfortunate, but it is inevitable that any touchscreen phone released in the post iphone market will be compared to the iphone. It will be compared to the prada and the HTC touch to name but a few. The media can (again, unfortunately) make or break a product and once a meme is born, it's hard to get rid of. The neo has been tagged the anti iphone. It has gotten a lot of hype without launching a single official ad. Whether it was originally intended to be a geek phone doesn't matter. Things have gotten a little bit out of hand and people all over (geeks and non geeks) are excited for the product. It has essentially become the little grassroots project that could.
<br><br>If it doesn't live up to the hype, the media will surely tear it to pieces before it even hits the ground. Who knows what will happen to future products from openmoko then? With the iphone price cut, the neo just lost the 'cheaper alternative' tag. Being unlocked doesn't make the neo special - you can buy any phone unlocked and unfettered off the net. Having a community of developers doesn't make it special either - you can get thousands of user developed (ie non commercial) software for all (real) smart phones. What makes the neo special is how loose a collar neo owners have in comparison to other unlocked smart phones.
<br><br>Come October or November, I can see blogs and other news media checking off all these points as reasons to bypass the neo. The question becomes whether the newly created openmoko team can survive if only a few thousand phones are sold. Maybe this is the volume they expected to sell from the get go. I wouldn't know. If that's the case, then none of this really matters since they are guaranteed to sell that much at the least.
<br></div></div>