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Openmoko: looking forward to 2009Openmoko: looking forward to 2009Posted Jan 5, 2009 22:25 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)Parent article: Openmoko: looking forward to 2009
Here is what I'd do:
Take the Beagleboard reference board, or other Cortex-A8 reference system.. eliminate some of the features, and then add a GSM chip via GPIO or whatever else is wonderful, then ship Android on it. (Or at least have a Android system built for it and working from the get-go. This will alleviate fears among potential end users that the software isn't up to snuff.)
Cortex-A8 should provide enough 'umphf' to run the system and provide fancy graphics at VGA or HVGA resolutions without requiring proprietary video drivers. As well as drive other important 'smartphone' features like HVGA mp4/ogg video playback, AD2P over bluetooth, and other essential features that people enjoy on medium-level phones today.
Aiming for anything less, IMO, will mean that your going to end up producing today's phone tomorrow.
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Openmoko: looking forward to 2009 Posted Jan 5, 2009 22:46 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Tomorrows phone
is unable run from batteries?
It's oh so easy to do systems integration by arm waving, if only reality worked that way.
Openmoko: looking forward to 2009 Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:33 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
...and you'd end up with a phone that runs out of battery in an hour because you're using a system that pulls ~2W before even considering radio power.
Openmoko: looking forward to 2009 Posted Jan 6, 2009 7:04 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
http://www.google.com/search?q=arm+cortex+power+consumption
You can use the OMAP3430/3530 (as in the BeagleBoard) as an example.
Openmoko: looking forward to 2009 Posted Jan 7, 2009 18:50 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Hrm. Yes exactly.
Anyways current generation phones can suck down the power also... When your using them at full force. If your using your 3G network connection and decoding video and audio then you can expect dramatically reduced battery life... taking something that would run for days on a charge down to a couple hours.
The point is to use good power management features so that when your waiting for phone calls all your dealing with is that tiny little dedicated Arm core that is being used to power the GMS side of things and leave the rest of the phone is a pretty much suspended state.
Then when you need the performance you can use it.
If your serious about running a Linux-based smart phone you have to use a very powerful system. Linux is no lightweight... It's definitely the biggest and most full featured operating system that your ever going to run on a phone and your system and power requirements are going to reflect that.
Trying to get around that and your just going to end up with some slow-performing pile that won't match either the performance or battery life that your going to get from using a Symbian or other special purpose phone OS.
Sure you can strip down and get Linux to run on tiny systems... but that's only going to leave you with a very specific purpose OS without much in the way of the flexibility, familarity, programmablity, that you'd get from running a more conventional Linux system. No shell, no python, no Java, no GTK, no system daemons, no plug-n-play hardware support, advanced networking features, no full featured user interface, etc etc.
Openmoko: looking forward to 2009 Posted Jan 6, 2009 20:27 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.omap/15074
I have no idea where you got the idea that beagleboard takes 2W. omap3 is chip specifically designed for mobile phones. Notice that later in the thread people are wondering why those numbers are so bad - there seems to be 80mA too much being consumed ;)
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