A first look at the OpenMoko Neo 1973 [LWN.net]

A first look at the OpenMoko Neo 1973

Posted Aug 31, 2007 9:35 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335)
In reply to: A first look at the OpenMoko Neo 1973 by NAR
Parent article: A first look at the OpenMoko Neo 1973

There are certainly users who care about the "sexiness" of a phone, or consumer products in general.

But everyone I know has something they don't like about their particular mobile. For instance, in Holland you often send an SMS in English as well as Dutch. Some phones save the last setting for T9 text input, which can be quite annoying as you start to enter text, if you don't remember what the language the last SMS you sent was in. It would be nice if the phone either had a tiny 2-letter language icon somewhere (EN, NL, FR, and so on) or flashed the language for a half second or so when you started to input.

Also, on my current phone it takes me 10 keypresses to change from English to Dutch or back. On my previous phone there were fewer keypresses, but you had to hold down a key for a period of time to change. Either is time consuming, and annoying as my Dutch is horrible and I often give up and throw in an English word or two in the middle of an SMS. ;)

Another example is custom dictionaries on T9 input. On my phone, if you choose to add a word the phone defaults to the capitalization you are using. So, if I want to add a word at the beginning of a sentence, it defaults to caps - I have made a mistake a few times and now have a few capitalized varsions of words in my custom T9 dictionary.

Plus, I've never had a mobile that let me delete or edit entries in my custom T9 dictionary.

And on and on and on.

My belief is that if there was user-hackable mobile software a lot of these issues would be resolved.

I bought my MP3 player because it was sexy, and now run Rockbox on it. Which, while the best firmware for the player, is actually anti-sexy. (I hide it from my girlfriend so she can't see the user interface - and the embarrassing pop music in my playlist!) ;)

(Log in to post comments)

A first look at the OpenMoko Neo 1973

Posted Aug 31, 2007 21:24 UTC (Fri) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]

> My belief is that if there was user-hackable mobile software a lot of these issues would be resolved.

...but probably not by the users themselves. Communities are usually more oriented in some general hacking-arounds and writing additional apps, not many people venture to do core changes -- and even when they do, the results are more likely to appear as complete forks. Everything here really depends on the original software vendor itself, which is usually quite reluctant to accept some random changes from the outside. Usually you have to choose from one of the forks out there, and further apply some other random tweaks to get something resembling the thing you've wanted to have. I think that's the main problem with the community participation -- they're too much outside of the process. Can only wish the best for OpenMoko in that respect, but for now I'm with Symbian-based phone, where almost everything is really *very* nicely put -- a thing I have never really experienced in any truly open source solution. Let's just hope things will change in future, though probably it would be a distant one. We need wise, alive and open-minded software vendors, the ones who create and maintain the mainstream version of the software.