Why one cannot recommend the freerunner as a daily phone

Timo Juhani Lindfors timo.lindfors at iki.fi
Sun Jun 21 09:30:56 CEST 2009


Thanks for reminding us about the issues that still exist. However,
you should really report them as bugs so that they don't get lost and
can be analyzed better.

Joerg Lippmann <jl_lists at donalbain.de> writes:
> - The device wakes up too slowly, I lost some calls.

Confirmed, ringtone is sometimes played few seconds (<10) later than
you'd expect.

I think this slowness is mostly due to userland. What if you

1) before suspend mute speaker
2) before suspend start aplay to play the ringtone
3) on resume check /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/0-0073/neo1973-resume.0/resume_reason
4) if resume reason is GSM, unmute speaker
5) if resume reason is not GSM, kill aplay and then unmute speaker

instead of waiting for ogsmd to interpret what calypso has to say?

> - The volume is way to low, You can really only use it indoors.

That's tricky but tunable. Do you have buzz-fixed version?

Using
http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/attachment/ticket/2121/gsmhandset.state.new
and finding a good value for AT+CLVL during a call should help. Your
dialer might be settings AT+CLVL to a bad value?

> - The Display is too dark for sunny days, even in the shade.

Confirmed although I really don't have another device to compare with.

> - The battery lasts only a few hours, again, I lost many calls (this depends 
> on the distro. But even with a »good« one, I had cases in which the device did 
> not suspend due to something crashing)

In suspend it should last a day easily. What's in current_now file
immediately after resume?

> - Wifi does not work reliably and it takes a long time to connect.

Bug #2277 Wireless does not work with the 2.6.29 kernel

> - the on-screen keyboards are all terrible for finger-typing. I liked the one 
> from QTe, but you have to install german wordlists by hand. Also it was 
> impractical to switch upper/lowercase. Best solution would be to use landscape 
> automatically. 

I'm a happy user of xvkbd. My layout is
http://iki.fi/lindi/openmoko/XVkbd-lindi -- I don't use a wordlist.

> (- Many people I called complained about terrible buzz, but I hope to get the 
> fix soon)

Ah, that makes the volume issue also difficult. Get the fix and then
tune the volume!

> - The alarm clock does not work reliably.

You should report that as a bug so that we can determine if it's a
hardware, kernel or userland problem. I'm just using a tool that
issues RTC_WKALM_SET to /dev/rtc0

> - When the battery is completely empty, it takes ages to reload the phone and 
> you're not able to turn it on even when plugged in.

Confirmed. This could be fixed by having e.g. u-boot force 500 mA
charging mode, show the user current charge and current and also maybe
dim the display so that most energy really goes to the battery?






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