why openmoko is so slow? Is it a joke?

[Bernd Prünster]

Joerg Lippmann schrieb:
> Am Montag 13 Juli 2009 schrieb Nicola Mfb:
>   
>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Ivan Shirokov<ivanshirokoff at gmail.com>
>> wrote: [...]
>>
>>     
>>>> Well, I would say it was a very bad joke. I spent eq. of 400 dolars, I
>>>> was waiting 1 year for glamo acceleration etc, etc. that would make the
>>>> phone usable etc, and it turns out, that it will never be. With the slow
>>>> bus, one can forget about acceleration... What can be accelerated if you
>>>> have to send information about complex bitmaps...
>>>>         
>>> That's really sad =(
>>>       
>> 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?
>
> 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). So I 
> really regret my decision to buy it. But then again, it was touted as a real 
> phone for end-users back then and being a happy Linux-User for 14 years, I 
> thought that I could live with some minor flaws...
>
> 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 
> 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.
>   
just a few words. (for the first time i think its worth to say something 
about negative criticism)

speaker volume: a littel low (every fr seems to be a little bit 
different regarding audio) and i am one of those lucky bastards without 
a buzz (depends also on the gsm network) and with volume where i can 
understand everything well even out on a busy street, but i totally get 
your point. tooke me month to put my alstate to perfection. i even had 
to turn teh mic volume down, because othe people complained it was too 
loud (overdrive). before my alsastate balancing act aoudio was crappy, 
but i am totally aware of the fact that ijust got lucky.

battery life: my best experience was fdom with approx 4 days (calypso 
deep sleep was still enabled and i misses only about 5 calls in one 
month, again i seem to be lucky and maybe thsi aswell depends on the 
network, althoug i dont really know how) freaky thing was: after 
reflashing with om2008.8 i knew what the calypso deep sleep bug was... 
since then battery life is about 2 days)

pda: what do you need? pilminco is does the job wonderful, but i _do_ 
get your point.

advertising the fr as a usable phone: that si a point where i totally 
agree with you: it was advertised to be "usable" for advance 
users/developers, but even if you are _THE_ code guru you cant fix teh 
buzz for example.

unstable: i have to agree: my current system doesnt handel gprs well and 
wlan is a kernel bug.

sluggish: OH YES! glamo was a mistake. also you do feel the missing fpu, 
because there are no DSPs/external fpus. althoug i managed to watch 
videos in fullscreen (320x240) with synch audio on om2008 a simple 
shellscript ans some transcoding did the job (again DSP and the glam has 
amp4 dsp which works like a charm, but the bandwith to the gpu(???) is 
the bottleneck) but lets not concentrate on teh graphics: a slow bus 
doesn make the deviec slow it just makes the display choppy, but as you 
stated the software is far from finished, so everything else fels slow + 
there is room for a lot of gui optimizations that would really kick in.

software in general: yes! a lot is still not runnign on openmoko phones. 
i phrased this sentence, because a lot of software ust hasnt been ported 
and optimized for the small screen.

long sotry short: i think you are kind of right. personally i think the 
software will be reall yuser friendly and _really_ work out fo the box 
when the device is oblosete. on teh other hand teh palm pre seems to be 
on second place regarding openness (some people already ran a system 
compiled from source with full kernel and driver support, although afaik 
on versions of teh palm pre without gsm/disabled gsm).

personally i dont regret byung the fr, because it is fun to play with 
and i've been able to use it as my daily phone since october last year 
(2 weeks after i got it). but from what i've heard from other fr users i 
am just one lucky bastard...

i get nearly all of your points, or should i say i get all of your 
points to a large extend althoug i disagree at some stage.

my personal opinion about your statements: finally someone who doesnt 
see everything just black and white! so for that part i am sorry you 
were disappointed and for some of the points you mentioned i am still 
veeery pissed at openmoko and their marketing/advertising strategy, but 
the more i pissed i am at openmoko the more i am impressed of teh 
community and the amazing work they did.