beautiful qt based

Timo Jyrinki timo.jyrinki at gmail.com
Thu Apr 8 14:15:47 CEST 2010


2010/4/8 Christoph Pulster <openmoko at pulster.de>:
> excellent idea - this is exactly what Openmoko missed to do to get more
> interested customers (besides geeks).

Yes.

> I check status of Openmoko and come to the result:
> OM Inc.: zombie

Mostly, but especially they have moved away from phones to other areas.

> Community: nearly dead

Not true. The problem is just that Openmoko the distribution is no
more, and Openmoko the company is no more a phone company. People have
now moved to distribution communities like SHR, Debian or QtMoko, and
this so-called Openmoko community, what remains of it, is basically a
set of people possibly caring of wiki.openmoko.org content, hardware
owners that want to sometimes have a glance on whatever new
distributions there are for the FreeRunner (like me) or people having
belief Openmoko Inc. will come up with other interesting non-phone
gadgets like the Wikireader.

But mostly it always was about FreeRunner owners wanting to have
"official" software distribution usable on their phones, but then the
effort was stopped and moved to mostly SHR, which has its own forums.

> sales: 2/week (talking as the major distributor)

Probably not that many FreeRunners sold at this point of time indeed,
but I think many are currently interested in the pre-fixed versions,
ie. #1024 and bass fix also included. If I'd be buying a new phone,
like I just did with another FreeRunner, I'd enjoy that the hardware
bugs, as many as possible, would be already fixed. FreeRunner had a
good amount of those...

> lets wake up, the game is over :-(

It has only begun in my opinion :) Neo FreeRunner is still the only
phone (really) usable with free software like the FSO via SHR, Debian
etc., but within a year we should some of the current development
efforts on other devices - HTC Dream, Nokia N900, Palm Pre etc. -
bring some more mature status where people can flash / reinstall their
device and just use it as a phone. Before I can use Debian
problem-free including phone functionality on some other device, I
cannot see myself moving from FreeRunner to any other device.

With luck, we will some more free-software friendly phone products
coming out as well, to be a better continuation of the pioneering work
Openmoko Inc's devices started and indeed not being a game over for
resellers that did have some business being an Om Inc delivery
channel.

-Timo



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