Second impressions, incl. BT keyboard

[Mikko Rauhala]

Soo. I got mine. First impressions were sent to the community list (see
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2007-July/008525.html ),
then I remembered this list. Probably the place to continue
experience-gathering. And mickeyl asked me to "blog" about the BT
keyboard thing, but having no active blog, I figured this is the next
best thing ;)

So yeah, I bought a prepaid SIM to continue fiddling with the Neo while
having my usual one in my old phone. Seemed to have some problems
getting it to work from a clean slate, though that may've been just some
of the random glitches the Moko's had. I "initialized" the SIM using my
usual phone, got the first "Welcome to our service" messages and setting
SMSs. Then I put the SIM into the Neo again, and managed to make a call.

I don't currently have a working mixer state for handset use (the mic
doesn't seem to be enabled in the wiki-linked state, and as said in my
previous mail, the flash image handset state made a sound loop between
the mic and the stereo speakers), but the headset mixer state allowed me
to make a call with audio going both ways. gsmd doesn't seem too stable
at this point, but that's par for this course, one supposes.

So both my usual Saunalahti SIM and the prepaid DNA SIM (these are
Finnish operators) seem to get the phone hooked up. The SIM problems
some seem to be having are certainly not pervasive and do not apply to
all common-use SIMs.

I also now tried a bit of the Bluetooth fun; as the flash image nicely
provides hidd, I charged aheard and powered up the BT module as
instructed at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Support , scanned
my (Freedom Mini) keyboard with hcitool scan, and hooked up with hidd
--connect [address].

Lo, I could type with it at least in the terminal and the message
creation dialog. Some apps would not take keyboard input, such as the
dialer and the calculator; this is not really important, of course, as
they're designed to be used with the touchscreen, but putting in
appropriate keybindings for the buttons would perhaps add a tad more
flexibility for some use cases without real downsides (ok, so maybe a
bit or two of memory consumption :). I know people have more important
things to do though; maybe I'll patch things like that myself if I find
myself in a mood to do something but too braindead to do anything
much ;)

There's no PIN stuff with the keyboard (as is the case when used with my
desktop as well), and I don't know how secure the connection is (one
could hope that it's secure _if_ connection setup hasn't been
eavesdropped, but I really don't know even that; I'm no BT expert).
Perhaps better input passwords with the on-screen keyboard. And of
course if one is sshing out of the phone, to use ssh public key auth so
you don't need to type in passwords, at least ones that are useful
without the key.

Tried to unmount the (automatically mounted) microsd to mke3fs it
instead of the default VFAT. However, umount just goes "Inappropriate
ioctl for device". Of course, one _can_ use VFAT even for software and
stuff so changing the format isn't really mandatory but... ;)

Oh yeah, this is using the following kernel and root images:
uImage-2.6.21.6-moko10-r1_0_0_2388_0-fic-gta01.bin
openmoko-devel-image-fic-gta01-20070728081358.rootfs.jffs2

Cheers

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - mjr at iki.fi     - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist   - WTA member     - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>