OpenMoko Might Live On With N900 Phone Base

[Detructor]

It looks quite bulky ... why would anybody want to have such a brick?

for one because I really don't like these thin things. I always have the feeling of breaking it if I'm not careful enough. Also I hate touchscreen keyboards. And to my knowledge the N900 was one of the last phones which had a full (QWERTY) slider keyboard. Also I like that to have some gimmick which for most users would be useless. In this case, there are two: The FM transmitter and the IR transmitter.

Also it's not running Android nor iOS nor WP, which is awesome!

But as I said, not for that price.

[ssam]

I'd totally buy it for 300?. But 600?? Are you kidding me? The device layout is not new and the components used are old (by IT standards). How do they manage to come up with more than 600?? Do I get a cupper or platinum bar with it or something like that?

That how electronics prices scale

BTW. This is about current GTA04 prices depending on demand, just to give you all some insight:
> 1 buyer: 3000 EUR
> 10 buyers: 1500 EUR
> 100 buyers: 590 EUR
> 1000 buyers: 490 EUR (here it would include a better CPU, e.g. OMAP4)
> 10k buyers: 390 EUR (here it would include a new plastic case)
> 100k buyers: 290 EUR
> 1 Mio buyers: 240 EUR
> 10 Mio buyers: 199 EUR

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1369348&postcount=5

Hence its always easier for big companies to make cheap hardware.

[KellyClowers]

I think the key question is how these specs compare to Jolla's phone:

• Cortex A8 (1 GHz) vs Snapdragon (2x 1.4 GHz)
• RAM: 512 MB/1 GB vs 1 GB
• Screen: 3.5" 800x480 vs 4.5" 960?540
• Expansion: additional sockets & I2C vs Other Half (power, I2C, NFC, also more convenient to attach).

The Jolla comes out ahead for those, with the neo900 having the positives of:

• appealing to people who refuse to give up their N900s
• being available outside of Finland (for now)

I have a N900, but it seems like the Jolla makes way more sense from a specs and cost perspective. That said, the neo900 already has more than half of the funding they need, so clearly there are a lot of people who disagree with me.

Jolla is CRAP! No keyboard (and zero evidence that their "other half" thing could cover attaching a keyboard) and capacitive screen alone make it worthless to me.

[KellyClowers]

>it's borderline insanity and mostly a project for extreme free software fanatics or those who really want to tinker with an open phone hardware platform at the lowest levels.

Or those that just love their N900s. I don't have the skill for hardware hacking, or low-level software dev. I just love the screen, the keyboard, the OS and the overall feel of it. But it is more and more outdated, and getting harder to find new ones if it breaks. I do worry a bit about even the availability of n900 cases...

But yeah this will be great if they can do it. I put in 150 euros already, and I will buy the final product, whatever it costs.

[dee.]

Jolla is CRAP! No keyboard (and zero evidence that their "other half" thing could cover attaching a keyboard) and capacitive screen alone make it worthless to me.

1) Jolla has themselves said the interface between the phone / other half is capable of supporting a keyboard, and that it's possibly something that can be available for the phone in the future, and there's no reason to assume they'd be lying.
2) Is there a better option than a capacitive screen? Resistive? Yeah right....

[vick]

As a UMPC fan when they were popular and now when they're pretty much non-existent, this was some nice news when I heard about it about a couple weeks ago but this probably won't perform very well as a UMPC. I'm sure it'll work well as a phone that can be used as UMPC every now and then but it'd be nice if a company made a successor to the below running on an Intel Bay Trail Atom which hopefully isn't as hard to get Linux on unlike the ASUS T100.


I'm looking for a relatively powerful ultra-mobile PC with a keyboard and mouse to take around on many occasions and not really a fairly low performing phone/PC device where I would have in my pocket at all times. For now, I'm putting up with a Droid 4 running Android and occasionally using a Linux distro in a chroot. It's definitely not ideal.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

>extreme free software fanatics
You mean those people that care if their mobile phone is a surveillance device or not? Fanatics! Let's ignore this problem and stick to convenience.

[KellyClowers]

1) Jolla has themselves said the interface between the phone / other half is capable of supporting a keyboard, and that it's possibly something that can be available for the phone in the future, and there's no reason to assume they'd be lying.
2) Is there a better option than a capacitive screen? Resistive? Yeah right....

Source for that? Last I had seen they had said nothing of substance beyond the stupid cover/theme changer thing.

Yes, resistive is much better.

[KellyClowers]

running on an Intel Bay Trail Atom

Ugh, why would you do that?!

I want the opposite, a nice netbook/smartbook/ultrabook/whateveryoucallit running an ARM instead of a damn Intel. Some of the Asus Transformers are about the closest it seem like you can get, especially the TF700KL... Expensive and hard to buy though.

[dee.]

Source for that? Last I had seen they had said nothing of substance beyond the stupid cover/theme changer thing.

http://jolla.com/

"Extension interfaces for the Other Half smart cover with wireless NFC, power in/out and I2C data connectivity"

Yes, resistive is much better.

I think you have things mixed up. Capacitive is the good, newer one. Resistive is the shitty old one that was used on PDA's and such.