2008-10-04 Neo Freerunner
by Vasil KolevA few days after I came home, “a group of concerned citizens” (who will be required to come to a spaghetti dinner at home, after they return from various countries) explained to me that I can’t go aroing with phones like these (old, worn out and worst of all – Siemens) and gave me as a present one Neo Freerunner.
For whomever hasn’t (because of some accident) heard about this phone – it’s a phone with almost open hardware and open software. Runs under linux, the schematix are available on the site, it’s joy for the soul :).
The hardware is good – a good-resolution display, GPS, wi-fi and all such nice things (no 3G, thouh) and you can talk to the phone by plugging it in the USB, configuring the Ethernet interface you see and logging over ssh to the phone.
(there isn’t a gadget that fun :) )
There’s this bad problem, though – the software right now is really bad. It starts, works, but the stability (especially the GSM part) is not there. There are a lot of options that you can chose from – Qtopia, om2007.2, om2008.8, SHR, etc. (they’re described at the openmoko site), but in the end no one is thought to be stable. Not to mention the ugly bugs with the battery…
I tried using it for a few days and that turned out not to be doable, so this will lead to a pretty ugly fate for the phone – I’ll be doing experiments with it :) The first thing is that I can use it as a wireless card almost everywhere, let’s see if I can run kismet on it, etc., and I’ll be testing the new releases until they became useful :)
(a few moments ago the compilation of SHR failed, but I’ll probably sleep first before starting to break it)
And worthy mentioning – the thing might have only 256MB of storage and use busybox, but it’s still really comfy to use over ssh. If I had a ssh client in my head, I wouldn’t need another phone :)