why openmoko is so slow? Is it a joke?

[Nicola Mfb]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Joerg Lippmann<jl_lists at donalbain.de> wrote:
[...]
>> AFAIK there is still some space for improvement in general responsiveness.
>> Actually there is a busy loop eating CPU to wait for graphical
>> operations to complete.
>> There are working in progress to avoid that. When the fix will be
>> ready *and* adopting a good design pattern for applications (e.g.
>> GUI/logic multithreading split, fusion of frequently used phone tasks
>> in monolitic one-shot load and forget applications) we may see an
>> acceptable speedy freerunner.
>
> When will that be? When the device is completely obsolete?

Yes it may be, let's hope that software will be ready for the next
linux phone and let's think that the 400$ was to pay developers and
designers that now are coding for free.

> Sorry, but after a year of waiting I still have an expensive brick that I can
> neither use as a proper phone (speaker still WAY to low, too unstable, too
> slow, too battery-hungry) nor as a PDA (no usable software available).

I agree it's unstable, I experienced all the possible problem in my
freerunner year, sim not recognized, WSOD, NSOD, sd corruption
partition, sd card interference with GSM, Wifi problems, usb
enumeration problems, suspend with no resume, difficulties to recharge
the empty battery and so on.
Now that openmoko does not develops the kernel anymore we have only to
hope that actually volunters kernel maintainers will have time to
improve it (and above all a copy of NDA documentation :), while I
cannot guess if there is now community effort on GSM and other chips
firmware.

[...]

>
> I'm really for the idea of freeing the phone (thats why I bought one), free
> hardware and the community. And I really loved to see this effort to succeed.
> But I came to realize that I start to hate this sluggish, instable device

some time I'm really tempted to launch it in the wall!, but after a
bit I calm down and remove the batteries, wait 10 minutes for debian
to complete a  6Gb fsck, and reconnect :)

> without good software. I cannot help it. I haven't found a single distro that
> works well out of the box. The best ones so far were QTopia/QTe and Android.
> And neither are really community efforts. So I consider my personal experiment
> (buying a community-driven phone for 300 EUR) as failed. Sorry.

Community driven? if you think that voting to add intone or mokomaze
to the default image is sufficient, than yes: it's community driven.

But after all I consider it the best way I spent my money.

    Nicola