GTA02 is now an expensive brick

Craig Woodward woody at rochester.rr.com
Wed Jan 7 21:47:55 CET 2009


---- Ian Darwin <ian at darwinsys.com> wrote: 
You accuse me of mincing words. Let's see if you'll stand by your words. 
If you really feel the device is that worthless, sell it to me for $10.00.
Final offer.
=============

Ok:
A> Learn to crop your replies...
B> My point wasn't to LOSE more money by selling to you for $10.  My point in selling now is to try to not get screwed a second time when OM drops support for it, like they did for the GTA01 last month.
C> If you think it's such a great "phone", why not buy it from me for full price?  Clearly if it's so great, you'll have no problem re-selling it.  Didn't think so...

I didn't buy this phone as a gadget to work on for months that MIGHT eventually make a nice GPS. For half the price I could have gotten a real open source kit and the parts to put together something like this, minus GSM.  Something with a REAL SDK, fully open and STABLE source, and support from the company that sold it to me. 

I bought this to use as a phone that I could get into, add to, and modify if I wanted to.  That's how FIC marketed it, as a consumer ready device, open source, with MAYBE a small power issue in that it wasn't supporting stand by mode.  OM wasn't it's own entity, or if it was that wasn't made clear.

Now FIC has shifted ALL responsibility off to OM.  OM says they're not focused on the GTA02, but are marketing to "future phones", like the GTA03.  They've also completely dropped support for the GTA01.  And core functionality on ALL Neos, like making and receiving calls and SMS, is still unreliable.

The FreeRunner wasn't marketed as a prototype device.  It was marketed as consumer ready, and it's not there, and doesn't appear to be getting there any time soon, if at all.  Saying OM never said the software was ready doesn't change how it was marketed, or the fact that OM was initially formed and funded by FIC to develop software for it's phone.

I'm just pissed off that I spent $400 on a device that was supposed to be my next phone, and 8 months later it's still sitting in a box because it's not usable as a normal daily phone.  And it doesn't help that people keep saying the FreeRunner was marketed as a development platform, when it clearly wasn't.




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