FreeRunner delayed a further 6 months?!?!??

[Mark Haury]

Timo Jyrinki timo.jyrinki at gmail.com wrote on Fri Mar 14 22:01:43 CET 2008
>First speaking about Neo being not open, it's funny to advertise a
>device with lots of proprietary software and problematic, very closed
>pieces of hardware, preventing any theoretical free software
>distribution to be actually usable on the device. And regarding out of
>the box functionality, it plays none of digital music I have since the
>vendor refuses to support free/open media formats, even actively
>fighting against them.
>
>I don't think there's currently a competitor on sight to Neo phones on
>openness, though of course things could always get improved. My pet
>peeve would be to work on i18n and open up mailing list to
>translators, but I guess it's again a bit later on :)
>
>-Timo

...and the Neo *is* fully open? What about the graphics module, the gps module, and the gsm module? You may get some I/O specs, but the modules themselves will never be open. They won't even release the CAD files for the case in their original form...

I have yet to come across any media file that I can't play on my N800; it plays ogg, wav, mp3, wma, wmv, xvid, etc. It even plays some Web media that my desktop kubuntu machine won't. It sounds to me like you're going on hearsay rather than personal experience.

In order for there to be "competition", there has to be something available. The Trolltech Greenphone comes to mind, though, as its availability matches the Freerunner's at this point. Not to mention that's the origin of Qtopia that everybody seems to be running on their Neos rather than OpenMoko. That's more than a little revealing...

What good is openness if you can't get your hands on the device? Vaporware isn't very useful to most people...

Mark