The Neo900 Phone Project Is Still Happening

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Neo900 Phone Project Is Still Happening

The Neo900 project remains an effort to provide a motherboard replacement for the once-popular Nokia N900 smart-phone while carrying on the tradition of the OpenMoko project...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY5Nzc

[dos1]

Small correction:

Golden Delicious Computers stepped down from its role as "project owner" it never intended to have, but it will be still working on the project - just this time for Neo900 UG, not the other way around. GDC used to do money accounting for the project, but that turned out to be a mistake, as it put liabilities on GDC side despite of the fact that it wasn't GDC who was supposed to develop the device.

Also, "one of many Android smart-phones that can be rooted" is sure more powerful, but not as documented, not as hackable and not as flexible. Rooting most of Android phones is like running free software on Windows - very useful, for many more than enough, but not enough for others.

[KellyClowers]

>The hardware specs aren't anything to get excited about at all with anyone wanting a Linux phone with good performance will probably be best off with one of many Android smart-phones that can be rooted.


Yes, you do that. I'll be over here with my phone that is actually awesome. Keep your Androids!

[cb88]

The radio looks like it covers many bands well... however the price and specs are appalling. "motherboard w/o case expected to be in the 500-700 EUR " quoted from the golden delicious computers site... thats just crazy prices.

I could understand the prices if they wanted to deliver a top end open source device it would be worth the premium but as it stands most 120$ phones can run circles around this :/ more cpu power, more flash, more ram ... larger screens and more battery is commonplace in other devices.

Choosing open source shouldn't mean that you have to use a low end device.... that said the aesthetics and design are great just like an n800 or n800 series device.

[KellyClowers]

The radio looks like it covers many bands well... however the price and specs are appalling. "motherboard w/o case expected to be in the 500-700 EUR " quoted from the golden delicious computers site... thats just crazy prices.

I could understand the prices if they wanted to deliver a top end open source device it would be worth the premium but as it stands most 120$ phones can run circles around this :/ more cpu power, more flash, more ram ... larger screens and more battery is commonplace in other devices.

Choosing open source shouldn't mean that you have to use a low end device.... that said the aesthetics and design are great just like an n800 or n800 series device.

Yeah, well, the minimum order for larger ram chips is much higher. And the SoC is limited to something pretty darn similar to what they had, unless they want to do an entire SoC port on top of everything else. And if you want larger screen (if anyone is even making larger high quality resistive screens...), you need to engineer an entire new case. That ain't a hobby project anymore, and would need a much larger and more diverse team, besides more money.

[[Knuckles]]

The radio looks like it covers many bands well... however the price and specs are appalling. "motherboard w/o case expected to be in the 500-700 EUR " quoted from the golden delicious computers site... thats just crazy prices.

I could understand the prices if they wanted to deliver a top end open source device it would be worth the premium but as it stands most 120$ phones can run circles around this :/ more cpu power, more flash, more ram ... larger screens and more battery is commonplace in other devices.

Choosing open source shouldn't mean that you have to use a low end device.... that said the aesthetics and design are great just like an n800 or n800 series device.

While I agree that this is very expensive, this isn't about the hardware. This is about the software. I've used a Nokia N900 for two years, and yeah eventually got forced to android because my phone wouldn't charge anymore (the famous microusb contact issue), and hell did I regress. Maemo may be lacking in apps, but god android can be so obtuse at times, and it's like the designers don't care about power users and their use cases. If it runs facebook and instagram and angry flappy quiz, ship it!

But yeah, I'll stick with android. But I'll still be unhappy about so many of its design decisions. And I'll still long for the N900.

Also note that Neo900 will be a QWERTY phone, and that is a smartphone category where the best hardware is my current phone: Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G, which is not 4G (so Neo900 will be the only LTE QWERTY phone in existence), dual-core 1.5ghz, 1gb ram. So comparing against the top-of-the line QWERTY android, it's not *so* bad.

[curaga]

I could understand the prices if they wanted to deliver a top end open source device it would be worth the premium but as it stands most 120$ phones can run circles around this :/ more cpu power, more flash, more ram ... larger screens and more battery is commonplace in other devices.

Choosing open source shouldn't mean that you have to use a low end device....

How do you propose getting the million orders necessary to get those comparable prices? Economies of scale don't really work when you have an order for 100 devices.

If you say "make a cool device and market it well to non-open-source fans", where does the $1M design budget and the $10M marketing budget come from?

[droidhacker]

While I agree that this is very expensive, this isn't about the hardware. This is about the software. I've used a Nokia N900 for two years, and yeah eventually got forced to android because my phone wouldn't charge anymore (the famous microusb contact issue), and hell did I regress. Maemo may be lacking in apps, but god android can be so obtuse at times, and it's like the designers don't care about power users and their use cases. If it runs facebook and instagram and angry flappy quiz, ship it!

But yeah, I'll stick with android. But I'll still be unhappy about so many of its design decisions. And I'll still long for the N900.

Also note that Neo900 will be a QWERTY phone, and that is a smartphone category where the best hardware is my current phone: Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G, which is not 4G (so Neo900 will be the only LTE QWERTY phone in existence), dual-core 1.5ghz, 1gb ram. So comparing against the top-of-the line QWERTY android, it's not *so* bad.

Right... basically 4G isn't even 4G. The whole #G description is a meaningless pile of horse shit.
Also, you're welcome. I hand-wrote a pretty big part of the kernel for that phone, which unless you're running the crippled factory build of samsuckdroid, you are *definitely* running.

[droidhacker]

Also, "one of many Android smart-phones that can be rooted" is sure more powerful, but not as documented, not as hackable and not as flexible. Rooting most of Android phones is like running free software on Windows - very useful, for many more than enough, but not enough for others.

Actually, the more powerful devices are MORE hackable, and MORE flexible.
First, it isn't hacking if you actually have source code and documentation, but more because of the bigger user base and bigger organizations providing code and documentation. A couple of guys in their garage can make some code, but not much. Take a look at all the code that comes through code aurora (qualcomm). Also, you would be really surprised at just how closely hardware vendors (like sony, lg, etc) follow the reference designs.
Second, when you're dealing with hardware that hasn't been "good" for 3-4 years, its really difficult to come up with motivation to actually do anything. So yeah, a bunch of zealots will probably buy this thing, and they'll be really into it for... a week. Then it will sit on their bench forever.

Yes, there are some bits of current android devices that are binary, but in the grand scheme of things, they are relatively few, and dropping.
Also, it isn't like these guys will be *allowed* or *able* to provide a full stack of source code for OMAP3. There are as many parts of that that TI will force them to keep closed under NDA, as qualcomm does, so in truth, our high-end Android devices are *JUST* as open source as this will be.

In fact.... OMAP3.... has a... get this.... POWERVR SGX 530!!!!
Have fun everyone, that is *THE* GPU that is absolutely the LEAST open source friendly of ALL. Even NVIDIA is better.

LOL

[droidhacker]

Also dos1... when you compare rooting an android phone to running free software on MS... that is wholly inaccurate, since the first thing you do when you gain root, is to use it to blow the factory crippledroid off the device and replace it with something you build from source yourself... i.e., something *good*. Doesn't have to be Android if you don't want it to be.

https://github.com/freedreno/nexus4-fedora