More changes at Openmoko [LWN.net]

More changes at Openmoko

Posted Jun 3, 2009 20:55 UTC (Wed) by farnz (guest, #17727)
In reply to: More changes at Openmoko by laf0rge
Parent article: More changes at Openmoko

And it faces a big problem due to the lack of 3G support - there are people like me who would like a Free phone, and would pay for it, but are provisioned with USIMs that require a 3G capable handset. I thus cannot buy a 2.5G only handset, as my network subscription simply will not function.

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More changes at Openmoko

Posted Jun 3, 2009 22:09 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

This is quite possibly what OpenMoko should of done from the beginning:

http://www.gizmoforyou.com/comment.php?comment.news.40

It's the flow phone.

Instead of designing a new board from scratch they took a off-the-shelf solution from Gumstix for the main processor board.

They designed a daughter board to go with it that plugs into the main board which provides break out for mounting other devices...

So what features you want depend on how much you want to spend on the thing.

Camera, regular GSM, 3G module, etc etc. If you want 3G rather then a regular wifi phone then thats probably going to cost you another 50-100 bucks or whatever.

Very very cool.

Now I have not seen anything showing a actually working phone yet... but it is still cool.

http://www.gizmoforyou.com/comment.php?comment.news.40

Gumstix vs. gta02-core

Posted Jun 4, 2009 10:12 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

The idea of using Gumstix has occurred to people before: there's the TuxPhone (http://www.opencellphone.org/) and the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club has a list of similar projects (http://wiki.hbmobile.org/index.php?title=Hardware_Projects). Moreover, the availability of GSM modules like those of Telit has changed the landscape somewhat.

Although the Gizmo Flow is a good idea, I'm not yet convinced that the Gumstix Overo boards are ready for prime time. From what I've read, the kernel build for OMAP doesn't support power management properly (http://www.gumstix.net/Hardware/cat/Benchmarks-power-temp...), leaving the components running very hot. And for those wanting to "remix" their hardware, Gumstix mainboards are not openly documented, so there's obviously a gap in the market there.

Gumstix vs. gta02-core

Posted Jun 5, 2009 0:41 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Cool. Thanks for the info.

Still, even though the Ovaro is not open source I think that this is probably the best approach right now for a Android phone with the combination of good performance and openness.