<div dir="ltr">I was one of many volunteers that showed up to help out OpenMoko at their two booths at LinuxWorld here in San Francisco over the past three days.<br><br>Speaking from my "officially uninformed" status, I would say that the entire event was a huge success. Both booths always seemed crowded -- attracting far more people than our neighbours. A lot of people were just learning about the phone, while many others were well aware of the effort, and had been anxiously watching its progression towards a device that could actually be used on a day to day basis.<br>
Despite the overall meagre display that the phones could manage, they made quite a good impression amongst the attendees. (Qtopia, 2007.2, ASU/2008.08 and FSO were all shown in parallel)<br>To the confusion of the booth staff, we somehow ended up with two Neo Freerunners in Neo 1973 cases -- so those who see pictures from the show, don't be fooled by the case, they were Freerunners.<br>
<br>The people interested in the phone seemed to cover all demographics one would expect to find at LinuxWorld (a few I didn't expect to find), and the far majority had a bit of enthusiasm once they realised just what a open phone can do. People from various news websites were often around, and there are even some articles already up:<br>
<a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&nolr=1&q=openmoko&btnG=Search">http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&nolr=1&q=openmoko&btnG=Search</a> <br>The PC Magazine one even shows my phone's IMEI (yay, hehe), and the GPS hardware fix -- which was done before I recieved the phone.<br>
<br>I myself managed to meet quite a few interesting people, including fellow local users trying to form a San Francisco users' group:<br><a href="http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Openmoko_Local_Groups:_San_Francisco">http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Openmoko_Local_Groups:_San_Francisco</a><br>
<br><br>With any luck, there will be quite a few new faces around to further help with development, and bring the software platform up to par with the feature-rich hardware platform. It seemed to me that a lot of the "right" people had their interest piqued, so let's just hope they have $400 burning a whole in their pocket, and spare time to-boot.<br>
<br>Jeffrey Malone<br></div>