[PLUG] smart phone (GSM), running Linux + OpenMoko

[Santosh Dawara]

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/fancy_an_open_i_1.html

 From the article:
"In the meantime any developers or hackers looking to do some rock and 
roll demo's or try ideas that you simply cannot do on the locked phones 
out there would do well to look at the FIC Neo1973. It has OpenMoko on it.

The thing runs standard Linux. It'll work on the Cingular and the 
T-Mobile networks.

I called Sean, my contact at FIC and he laid some facts out. The team 
developing it are hard core open source activists and hackers. Harald 
Welte (Lead Software Architect -System level. Famous for hacking 
Motorola phones to run Linux) on the core kernel and Michael "Mickey" 
Lauer (Lead Software Architect -- Application Framework) on the graphic 
systems.

They have borrowed code from TomTom for the SD card support and 
currently have all their core libraries in C. The C part is actually 
very cool as it implies a possibility for bindings to other languages 
particularly, Python and Ruby. When asked about these he willingly 
chirped up in a happy tone "Yep. They are being worked on". My mind 
boggles if someone comes up with a code generation framework for rapid 
app development like Rails for it.

Something this potentially sexy has to be at Etel. That’s the rules. So 
I've roped them in to do their first ever Developer workshop at Emerging 
Telephony this year and they will also be demoing it on stage. Hopefully 
you'll be able to get your grubby hands on one there.

I am glad that this is finally coming about (having conceived and 
advocated Tuxphone) and when I can get my hands on one to do some 
hacking on it, there will be a full report here. In the meantime I hope 
they also consider releasing an emulator or an image of the OS for 
people to hack with."

The phone specifications are here:
http://www.openmoko.com/press/index.html#preliminary_specification
- Santosh

-- 
Santosh Dawara
+91 98608-36972
visit me at http://www.sukshma.net