phone (2)

N900: Nokia on the heavens door

Maemo screenshot

Finally, after OpenMoko+Neo Freerunner, a company like Nokia has prepare a complete device, between a cell phone and a handheld computer. I think it should be available long time ago. (I'm not going to take iPhone into account because is a close alternative.)

Its name is N900, and has everything you can expect from such a device. Powerrful processor, up to 64Gb (32Gb inside plus 32Gb in a MicroSD slot), GPS, Cellular modem, Bluetooth, Wifi, camera 5M with flash, screen 3,5" with big resolution at 800x480 and so on, but the most important is that Nokia has decided to open his mind and adopt a debian based linux distribution called Maemo to operate it. Yes, you are hearing right, they forget Symbian.

Maemo is an open source project, but not entirely. Some parts, like components drivers and control apps are closed. This means that, despite of being open, Maemo just runs in Nokia phones. It's hard to deal with this, but probable they want to establish a new mobile standard, software SDK hardware architecture, like OpenMoko+Neo Freerunner tandem. Working in private till a successfully acceptance and releasing it then.

Anyway we will have to wait to know more. By the way, N900 will be out at the end of 2009, and the price will be around $750. Altough this information are just rumors.

2009-08-22 08:49 by pichulines (1 comments)

OpenMoko turns CloseMoko

Neo phone running openmoko

Well, not exactly. In brief I'll tell about the OpenMoko project and the Neo Freerunner smartphone. The first is an attempt of developing a software stack for smartphones based on linux, since openmoko started some forks or distros have appeared based on it. The second one is a mobile device (nowadays called smartphone) with an open hardware architecture.

Both of them are open projects which means you can know almost everything about them :-) While openmoko is a kit of software tools to develop applications, neo freerunner (the second generation, after neo 1973) is the hardware implementation of reference.

Neo could be understand it as the well known x86 architecture in the mobile world and openmoko is just a sample operating system for it.

Currently, bad news have been published for these two great projects. Although openmoko continues, neo architecture won't. This means that they will continue manufacturing neo phones but they won't improve the architecture specifications, and consequently there won't be new models.

2009-08-06 21:07 by pichulines (0 comments)