A few days ago we ordered a Neo Advanced and we are looking forward to having it in our hands. It should arrive later this month. We might start a project with mobile phones, and we need to be able to use native applications.
The Neo advanced is a developer preview. It will be a phone made by hackers for hackers. In the future other users might find it useful if the community gets to develop good applications. I think they will get there: they will be able to provide a device useful for the general public.
Some even say that it is a iPhone killer (too much hype for my taste).
It's very hard to develop for some commercial phones that use the Linux kernel. It is easier to develop native programs for Windows CE.
For instance we wanted to develop for the Motorola A1200 but it's rather hard. It doesn't matter if it uses Linux, it's quite closed. It even uses SELinux to lock out the users (owners!) from their own phone. Motorola wants you to use Java for development. There's a project that is trying to support Linux 2.6 (as Motorola released sources for Linux 2.4) but it's rather stale. One of the developers was hired to be part of the the OpenMoko team.
It's not that the OpenMoko team haven't had any problems. They have. I think they will solve them.
Links:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo1973
- http://mobile.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/01/1655248
- http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/07/2057240
- http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where (SUN's CEO shows a Neo1973).
- http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMoko_Local_Groups:_Bogota
Discussion (8)Last update: 2007-08-03 (Rev 12661)