A GNU/Linux Smartphone Running GNOME & HTML5 Web Apps? Priced At $599, Ships In 2019 If The Stars Align

[AndyChow]

What's the power needs of the lowest powered i.MX8? I don't think they are power efficient chips. There is a reason their target market is home automation and car system.

And how exactly are they going to have 4G/LTE compatibility? Qualcomm has the monopoly on this, and that's why Chinese phones don't work in America except in 2G mode. Oukitel, Xiaomi, they can't support the american frequencies of 4G/LTE, so how is this company going to achieve this?

[Kendji]

If they deliver on their promeses, then I'll buy one! If not, then I'll be very sad...

[tildearrow]

The header bar reminds me of webOS (not the TV OS)...

Typo:

They plan to allow the device to connect to 2G/3G/4GB,

[expectATIon]

They need to sell 2,500 phones over the 60 day campaign. That's just over 41 phones a day. I hope they do it

Aside from producing hardware they will be creating software for the apps. I hope they will choose gnome/gtk rather than kde/qt . Will this code be accepted upstream? Have they discussed this with gnome devs? I don't think this project will be a priority for gnome

[hax0r]

$600 for meme project and yet another GNU mobile distro? No thanks.

There are some phones that already have mainline Linux support, such as Nexus 5. While it is not 100% featurful good bulk work has been already done, kernel 4.9 has basic support for Nexus 5, more here http://elinux.org/Qualcomm_SOC_Mainl...ks_on_the_8974

They could work together and put effort into writing an open source firmware for modem/radio instead, which is undeniably to most important piece right now needed to achieve foss mobile phone.

And in other news I read that don't even plan on writing their own baseband/modem firmware. Make you wonder what exactly is this project trying to do, slap half assed GNOME distro onto a random $600 phone? This won't be 100% free software (as in freedom) phone. Enjoy your proprietary CIA backdoored blob.

Learn to collaborate and stop fragmenting open source projects.

[starshipeleven]

And how exactly are they going to have 4G/LTE compatibility?

External modem (in the sense that it isn't inside the same SoC), like one of these https://nimbelink.com/skywire-4g-lte-cat-1/

[Guest]

Using Intel CPU/GPU seems to be the most feasible route. Although given that Collabora is working on open source drivers for the i.mx6 maybe this is feasible too.

[wizard69]

I want to believe...

I think i gave up on believing! I was extremely interested in OpenMoko when i fist heard about it but became disalusioned over time. I was left with the impression that the OpenMoko develooers didnt really grasp what users wanted and what would be considered viable in an initial product. There also seemed to be a lack of direction with the team, even confusion.

More importantly after the arrival of iPhone i realized that the most important thing about a cell Phone is that it works everytime you pick it up. I realized this when iPhone didnt work too well in the early days.

It comes rown to what is really important to the owner of the device. I dont have a strong need to hack the device, that energy gets expended on my laptops, Arduinos and other embedded "Toys".

Frankly this would have to be one very interesting cell phone to get me to drop iPhone. It is sort of like the idea of an open source microwave oven, the most important aspect of a microwave to me is a dinner in three minutes. On a cell phone it is of course the phone function but also E-Mail and web access. After that other functionallity rapidly descends in importance. I know many dont feel this way but i suspect that many do even people in the tech industry prefer something that just works in a cell phone.

[wizard69]

I dont really think crowd funding will ever be "over" bt it will morph into something more objective with perhaps peoplr looking at the teams plans and leadershipa bit closer.

With respect to Jolla it was a great concept but the project wasnt properly managed and simply didnt have the money deliver what amounts to a major product. It coukd be likened to the difference between a kickstarter for a car part and one for a whole new car. A guy can get a start with a car part in his garage while a car requires a huge investment and diverse capabilities on the team building the car. This doesnt even get into marketing and regulations.

There are syill lots of good things happening via Kickstarters. The projects though are smaller or projects from teams with a track record. So i dont see Kickstarters going away, i just see a smarter community that will obviously avoid high risk or poorly managed products. . So in a sense big projects will not be gone but the bar for success will be much higher. Jolla for me was very interesting but i stayed away becausevthe team left me with the impression they had no idea what they where doing. Not so much engneering as the othrr factors that make a company and a product successful. Beyond that 2.5 million wasnt even a stsrter for a project like Jolla tablet.

Looks nice, but a million and a half?

For scale the Indiegogo campaign for the Jolla tablet took in 2.5 million and that was before the enthusiasm in crowdfunding tanked due to a number of failures (like the Jolla tablet) and perceived ones (like Star Citizen). Don't get me wrong, I wish them best of luck, but to me it seems like the era of big crowdfunding projects seems to be over thanks to too much hype and too many failures.

[blackiwid]

I am not so shure about the formfactor, for Mobile I would want a build in keyboard especialy for real linuxes not some mobile garbage with binary blobs.

Also I would not want the mobile chip and cut it away from the cost, at least in germany mobile internet sucks most of the time anyway, and you have nearly everywhere wlan this days. even in our trains we have free wlan. I can then phone over sip...

Other than that, you probably would need to have the convergence thing going, then you could save some money in desktop computers or laptop which would then legitimate for me such high prices.

But I doubt it will be very fast, so I would prefer cheap desktop computers over that also 32gb is not much for a desktop. As emaple I use everywhere nixos, 32gb would be barely enough to use nixos but not to save much additional data.

So many question marks for me, but if that leeds to a new os or hardware plattform for other form factors. I would really like that.

Here were some stupid comments imho as example "even canonical did not get it done", the word even makes in that sentence no sence. It suggest that cannonical is a example of successful project, after their success to become the dominant deskop (which they work hard to reverse it), most projects they startet failed.

U name it, upstart, mir, unity, ubuntu one, Launchpad, Bazaar, Couchdb:

For the last three years we have worked with the company behind CouchDB to make it scale in the particular ways we need it to scale in our server environment. Our situation is rather unique, and we were unable to resolve some of the issues we came across. We were thus unable to make CouchDB scale up to the millions of users and databases we have in our datacentres, and furthermore we were unable to make it scale down to be a reasonable load on small client machines.

and thats only the things I can think of, I am shure I missed other stuff... So if canonical failes with something its the normal, if they succeed its the exception.