Openmoko: looking forward to 2009

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.