First Linux Phone Arrives in US

Mik3D writes "Looks like a Linux based phone has finally arrived in the US. It's called Identity and it features an interesting skin technology that allows users to purchase a faceplate with embedded ring tones, gui, etc... The phone is being offered by Dobson Cellular, an also-ran cell phone company that services those of us up here in the frozen north."

its a phone.

[torpor]

so unless you're an embedded developer and might re-use the code for your own product you're hardly having advantage of it running linux(as a customer)? doesn't really look like you could load your own native programs on it.


look, would you rather it were a closed-source operating system with no support, destined for the graveyard in some bankrupcy court, or 'sold off like a cheap truck of pigs' to some other mega-corp who squish it after exercising their own propietary OS into the same marketspace?

the fact its running linux means that the device itself is based on open standards. regardless of whether you can './configure;make;make install' from the touchpad, the fact its using linux just means that its got a good head-start environment for creative developers - like the guys selling these phones - to do interesting things.

its a phone, not a rootkit. linux is not just a vast landscape of tarballs ... its also a pretty darned good operating environment for embedded systems developers to use to make extraordinarily interesting devices for people who want to use those devices for specific tasks, not spend all day working out the switches for their USES= var ...

good troll though, down on the linux tip. i won't bother mentioning that the existence of devices like this mean that the desktop wars are over, and new battlegrounds are upon us, though ...

It's still "proprietary"...

[Ianoo]

It may run Linux at the bottom, but what of the GUI? Most likely it's some kind of memory mapped framebuffer, because you don't need anything more advanced than this for a mobile phone (although that may no longer be true with all the 3D games coming out, but I don't see a particularly rich interface on this phone in the marketing pictures).

Have the company released the api specification for the application that runs on top of the kernel and powers the phone's interface, so that developers can create new software that integrates with the phone? Without that, the phone is more proprietary in many ways than Symbian, Palm or PocketPC.

Remember that you can be quite clever here, since in general, most people seem to reckon that running a proprietary closed-source application on top of a GPL kernel isn't a violation of the license. So they can keep the source code for the GUI under wraps for as long as they want.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for using Linux in embedded devices, especially if there are Dollars or Euros or Yen going towards kernel.org to support this kind of work. But really, it's not a big deal from an end user's perspective, or indeed a Slashdot geek's perspective.

As a sidenote, haven't Nokia proved that freakish form factors don't actually sell? How am I supposed to look at the screen whilst typing a text message or e-mail on this phone?

Re:its a phone.

[gl4ss]

**its a phone, not a rootkit**

yes, but why but there's no customer benefit in choosing a phone like this over a phone that ran, say symbian, and did let you install native apps in addition o just offering j2me(and coding all kinds of funky lowlevel stuff like tickers that run over other programs when they're running to remind you of a meeting or whatever).

*the fact its running linux means that the device itself is based on open standards.* how does it running linux kernel mean it's based on "open standards"? it doesn't(apart from the kernel). again, if you're an embedded developer this is of intrest - but not to anyone as a customer.

as a customer/sw-developer i'm much more intrested in what possibilities this thing gives to me over the things already on market, and it doesn't give any.

Fashion Phone ?

[polyp2000]

Considering its a fashion phone its a real shame it looks like its got Peyronie's Disease.

Why could they not have made it a more "conventional" shape? It doesnt matter what OS is on the thing if it looks bad it aint going to sell.

Nick ...

And if you're left handed...

[ketonesam]

It looks like the phone is curved so that the earpiece and microphone fit for a right handed caller, but I guess lefties just have to hold it convex side facing front... unless there are actually speakers and microphones on both sides.