Daily Snapshot Review 09 April 2008

[Kevin Dean]

My full review can be found at
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-04-09 and the list
of reviews can be found
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Category:SnapshotReview

Today's image shows some changes and raise a few questions.

Firstly, boot time seems to have dropped a decent amount, almost 30 on
first boot! I did notice a decrease in X stability, about 1 in 6 boots
failed to start the Xserver. Not too bad, but still quite noticably
annoying.

A new feature (or perhaps I just noticed) has been added to
Openmoko-contacts that allows you to highlight an SMS message and
click the "add" button. A prompt will pop up that lets you add the SMS
to the contacts or create a new contact. Pretty useful, though I think
the pop up prompt (and the similar one in dialer) is pretty ugly and
contrasting with the simple, large and easy to use UI of the rest of
Openmoko.

The biggest change (as far as lines I needed to change in the review)
was the removal of Suspend. The "Lock Phone" option has been removed
completely and it now replaced with "Turn on Wifi". Selecting either
of the power management options do the same thing, dim and then
screensaver. As far as I can tell, there is no way to suspend a GTA01
device now.

It also raises the question of "Why does the GTA01 have a Wifi option at all?"

I've also reported a bug where Openmoko-contacts will sometimes add a
(null) contact when adding a new contact.

Today's recommendation is kind of conditional. I would NOT recommend
using today's image because of the decrease in X stability. I would
also recommend not using this image because of the removal of suspend
support (though, it didn't really work anyway) IF you use the feature.
However, if you feel that the ability to add contacts from SMS
messages is important, this image might have some value. In general, I
still recommend the 04 April 2008 rootfs with the 03 April 2008 kernel
(which will be on download.openmoko.org/recommended later today)

-Kevin Dean