Om2008.8 comments and questions

[Wolfgang Spraul]

Dear Helmut,
your priorities are our priorities _BUT_ it will still take quite a  
while, yes.
 From what you write, you seem to be indeed the perfect customer we  
are focusing our efforts on.
You have a Linux system on your desktop or notebook already, you are  
looking for a phone that works well with it.
At the beginning, you want to use the phone only for 'basic' phone  
usage.

How to get there? Well, I see a lot of development momentum building  
now, our ca. 20 internal software engineers don't actually make that  
big of a difference.
Great low-level patches are coming already, we are now trying to  
straighten up the build system to something more like Debian with  
stable/testing/unstable.
We are not developing a proprietary system and have no interest in  
doing so. Compatibility with Ubuntu and other distributions is very  
important.

I understand your frustration about importing contacts and alarms,  
thanks for the reminder, and rest assured that these things are indeed  
very high on our priority list, right after making phone calls and SMS.
Keep us honest if things don't improve fast enough!
Best Regards,
Wolfgang

On Aug 13, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Helmut Tessarek wrote:

> Hi Openmoko cummunity (and developmen team),
>
> I'm a little bit concerned about how priorities are set and handled  
> and would
> like to read your opinion.
>
> 2 weeks ago I got my Neo Freerunner with Om2007. I was able to get  
> it up and
> running, even importing my contacts from my old phone wasn't really  
> an issue.
> WiFi worked ok too.
>
> Then I flashed my phone with Om2008.8.
>
> Call me oldfashioned, but I'm one of the guys who wants to use his  
> phone for the
> reason it was actually built in the first place: making phone calls.
> I expect only 3 things from a phone (which are the most basic things  
> a phone
> should be able to accomplish):
>
> 1) making and receiving calls
> 2) managing contacts
> 3) alarm function
>
> I will go in more detail regarding these 3 points in a moment. I  
> know that the
> phone has overwhelming features and I would like to see them in  
> action, but
> first I should be able to use it as a phone. I don't care about GPS,  
> games or a
> graphical installer right now.
>
> ad 2) I was not able to migrate my phonebook from om2007 to om2008.  
> I had a
> backup from my home dir and I had the .vcf files on my sd card.  
> Well, entering
> my 500 contacts is not an option. The keyboard is more or less  
> useless, since it
> takes at least 'number of character' times 2 seconds to enter a  
> word, which
> cannot be guessed by the keyboard 'logic'.
> What about sending contacts via Bluetooth? What about importing vcf  
> files?
>
> ad 3) this does not work either. sometimes I can see an alarm icon,  
> but no alarm
> tone. hmmm, not much of an alarm then.
>
> These are basic functions which do not work and people are talking  
> about GTA03,
> cameras, GPS mapping functions.
> I don't get it. First of all the phone should be able to do at least  
> things that
> a 50$ phone can do.
>
> I bought the openmoko phone, because I'm using Linux and I thought  
> that it would
> be easier to sync contact and calendar data with my workstation.
> I was definitely wrong. The data is not even compatible between Om  
> releases.
> Furthermore it seems to me that a propriatary system is developed  
> which makes it
> even harder to communicate with standard Linux distros.
> In that case I could have bought the iPhone as well. At least that  
> phone works.
>
> As long as the priorities are not focused on basic features as I  
> described
> above, this phone will not be useable for quite a while.
>
> Regards,
>   Helmut
>
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