Golden Delicious Now Shipping Hackable Openmoko GTA04 71
An anonymous reader writes with an update to the updated Openmoko phone that's long been in the works. From the story at Linux For Devices: "German manufacturer Golden Delicious has begun shipping a hackable open source smartphone that runs a variety of Linux software, including a newly optimized Openmoko distro. The Openmoko GTA04 is available as a finished phone or as a board that slips into earlier Openmoko Neo Freerunner GTA01 and GTA02 cases, providing an 800MHz Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a full range of sensors and wireless features." It's rather expensive for a mid-range Android phone, but far more interesting than fairly ordinary phones decked out with bling.
This is a wonderful idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also 1,000 dollars.
I'm interested and supportive, but not enough to shell out a grand.
I'm guessing they're targeting the independently-wealthy geeks sympathetic to open-source and open hardware standards who don't mind having a second phone or don't care about app marketplaces and such.... Wait a second, who is going to buy this phone?
Re:Specs and price and ordering (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, the project is rather late and I get 99% of what I've wanted out of my N900 for less than it would have cost to buy the Freerunner then this on top.
That's the whole point though. Up till now, if you bought a Nokia N900 or N9, you were worrying what happens when you lose the device in two years time and there isn't anything equivalent on the market. The OpenMoko phone looked like a failure since the company gave up. Now they begin to look visionary and just a little bit too early. We now know for sure that people are going to keep coming out with these hobbyist devices and that they are going to keep getting better and better. That means you can start to take the idea seriously and invest time effort and even money. This is the equivalent moment to the moment when the ISA bus was added to the IBM-PC. Suddenly you realise that you have an open Linux based mobile device architecture which has escaped from the control of the big companies that were initially involved in setting it up.
Simplify features, Drop price, Get geeks on board (Score:5, Insightful)
Do all of those things first, and for a price under $100, and you can establish a solid community of geeks willing to pay for a phone w/Open Hardware.
Here's the deal: I really want to encourage and support the OpenMoko folks, but with the original Freerunner I just couldn't justify buying something that didn't have even solid telephony features, didn't have much battery life, and wasn't in a price range I could even afford (as a student).
Look, all the geeks know that we don't have all of the parts figured out yet, and last I heard Welte is still working on the first fully-FOSS GSM stack, so it's not just as simple as putting the pieces together and selling enough units to hit your $100, 200, or 500 target price. But the thing is that $100 is a small enough number that I and most of the full-time-employed geek crowd out there can probably justify getting a v0.1 TotallyOpenPhone each year for the next 3-5 years. But we've got to convince both ourselves and our significant others (for those of us who have been consed) that this is a good or at least not-bad decision.
So how do we convince ourselves? Easy -- we say that this 2nd GSM phone can serve as a "backup" for our first phone, you know, if anything happens to it, or if we accidentally drop it down a flight of concrete stairs or drop it into the churn while making fresh butter in the morning (I don't care what Kilgore thinks; the smell of fresh butter is much better than napalm). This logic is excellent; it works even better the less you think about it.
ARMed with our bullet-proof logic, we can now easily divest our pocketbooks of $100 and hand it over to whoever is brave/smart/crazy enough to make a run of Open-Hardware phones. We give them the money now, and then -- here's the genius part -- we tell them that there's more where that came from, if they make us a better phone next year. If it's a much better phone with many more features, we might consider paying $150 or $200 for it, but we let them know that what will allow us to buy it (remember that part where we lied...umm... convinced ourselves that it was a good idea?) is the requirement that it be a solid, low-cost device.
$1000 is just way, way too high a price for a product like this. Unless there's a solid strategy to drastically cut the price of the phone each year over the next 3-5 years, I just can't see enough product shipping to make the business sustainable. And we really, REALLY do want it to be sustainable. We don't just want one Open Hardware Phone. We want to see competition and innovation. We want to see a marketplace of Open Hardware.