Re: Discussion: what are your dreams for the Openmoko
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com write:
So what are your dreams with respect to open mobile handhelds?
What would you like as future hardware? What to see in software
distros? Anything else? What missing piece are you waiting for?
My dream is this: That we can convince some big manufacturer of Android
phones to support SHR or Maemo or MER on some of their obsolete handheld
phones. Surely Samsung, for example, must have some remaining stock
of Galaxy S{n} phones when they release Galaxy S{n+1} phones, and make
their old handset obsolete. Perhaps they can be convinced to provide
drivers and binary blobs to allow us to port some open OS to their
slightly old hardware. Since they have Android drivers already, making
Linux drivers should not be hard.They get to sell off some of their
old, slow moving stock, and we get open phones that are only one
generation behind state-of-the-art hardware, which would be fine with me.
The phones would have already been certified by outfits like the FCC, so
that expense would not apply. If they provide the drivers and needed
binary blobs, we could port our preferred OS. The phones could be sold
to us as is, with no end-user support from the manufacturer or carrier.
It's not a perfect solution, but I'd be satisfied with it.
Ken Young
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
kyo...@cfa.harvard.edu
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Free, as in beer, Freerunner - contest over
Someone wrote a program to rotate text, and has thereby won my extra Freerunner. So there is no reason to send me any other code snippets. If someone wants to tell me what Sendeh roo shamsheer means, I'd still appreciate it, but I have no more prize phones to send. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Free, as in beer, Freerunner
I have two buzz-fixed Freerunners, and I really can't figure out any reason why I need two. Somebody else should be having fun with one of them. I'm gonna give one away.If you want it, there are two ways to get it: Method one: Tell me the colloquial meaning of the Persian phrase Sendeh roo shamsheer, when applied to a person. I don't mean the literal translation into English - that's Turd on a sword. I want the idiomatic meaning. A friend of mine says is is a common expression in Persian. Method two: Send me a standalone program that can be compiled with the Openmoko cross compiler tool chain, which will use pango and cairo to print (in an X11 window on my Freerunner) a text string, provided by the user, rotated by an arbitrary angle, also provided by the user. The text must be antialiased. If you want the free Freerunner, complete one of the above tasks, and send the info to orrery.m...@gmail.com. Be sure to send the address to which you want the phone to be shipped. I'll pay for shipping. I will send the buzz-fixed Freerunner, and a battery. No uSD. No sock. No stylus. Sorry, I've only got one extra, so whoever completes one of the above tasks first gets the phone. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
gta02-core (was Re: OM future)
Wolfgang Spraul wolfg...@sharism.cc wrote: If the FreeRunner would be bug free, I'm sure people would still use them in 10+ years, easily. The truth is that even though the Freerunner is buggy as hell, some people will still be using them in 10+ years. Face it, we are now in the same boat as the Apple Newton fanatics. We play with phones, because we enjoy playing with phones. There is no viable business model here. None. Openmoko Inc had a far better shot at success than any open phone manufacturer will have again for the foreseeable future. When the Neo 1973 came out, there were no mass-market linux phones available. The competition was relatively weak back then. And still Openomoko was not able to make a go of it. Perhaps better management would have made a difference. But that doesn't matter now. If you go to the maemo IRC channel these days, it's like an Openmoko reunion. The people who want to make applications for a linux phone have moved on. They were a significant part of the Openmoko community, and they want a linux phone that works. If a gta03 were to go on sale tomorrow, I believe it would sell more poorly than the gta02 did. And the gta02 didn't sell enough units to keep Openmoko Inc in the phone business. The gta02-core and gta03 are of interest only to a proper subset of the people who were originally interested in Openmoko phones. As Raster has pointed out, the idea that a group of hobbyists is going to make a viable phone in their spare time, using parts which are collecting dust in Sean's closet, is risible. The other possible future for OM software is anti-vendor ports. It's hard to imagine that the OM software running on something like the Palm Pre will work more smoothly than the same software running on the OM hardware, for which the developers did not have to reverse engineer many things. So if the anti-vendor ports are successful, we'll end up being able to turn something like the Palm Pre into a buggy hobbyist toy like the FreeRunner. Hooray! Some in the OM community seem to suggest that if vendors *just knew* that they could have the wonderful SHR software for free, they'd design phones around it. I disagree. There is very little incentive for vendors and telecoms to support open systems, and plenty of reasons for them not to. From a vendor's point of view, selling a phone that the user has full control of is a nightmare. If something like the SHR stack ever actually entered widespread use, it would be the perfect platform for malware. Users would be bricking their phones right and left. Calls to service centers would go way up. Phone networks would be subject to DOS attacks. The only reason that PCs are general purpose computers is a historical accident - PCs grew out of the hobbyist market, and hobbyists wanted a machine they could program. There was no threat of external malware in the early 1980s. The constant fight against PC malware is the price we now pay for that heritage. Most PC users would be better off with a machine that came with a web browser, a few tools for photo manipulation and multimedia, and which could not have any additional software installed. With smart phones, the industry has a chance to replay history. They can make the platform closed, and largely prevent the whole malware nightmare. They can reduce the universe of software configurations they have to support. It makes sense for them to do that. Sad as it is for us, the most sensible approach for phone makers is probably Apple's. I enjoy playing with my Freerunners, and my Neo 1973. Others do too. But be honest with yourself - these phones are a dead end. At this point we are like the nut-cases who want to run linux on their iPods. Ken ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
openmoko PROJECTS area down again
The PROJECTS area (GForge site) of openmoko.org has been down for about one week.Has it been officially abandoned? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Quick e-mail poll: Still using your Freerunner?
a GPS unit which is hacker-freindly and linux based. When you're hiking, you very often can't get a GSM signal anyway, so who would care if the GPS unit they had was a cell phone too? What if the gta03 had no phone hardware, an excellent GPS subsystem, an electronic paper display, and wonderful battery life? I think *that* would be a much more exciting product than any realistically possible gta03 phone, and a more tractible engineering project too. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
[All] New version of the orrery program available
A new version of the orrery program has been uploaded to the GForge site, and to opkg.org. There are not many new user features - the Monthly Moon Calendar is prettier, and both moon calendars now show Blue Moons (including the one on New Years Eve, this year). Finger friendliness has been improved in a few areas. Several worthless features (stylus mode, etc) have been dropped. One of the most commonly cited bugs, which caused the program to fail if it was run on a phone whose locale had been set to a language which uses commas, rather than periods, as the decimal place separator, has been fixed. Thanks a bunch to Heiko Stubner, who submitted a patch that fixed this bug. Joshua Rosen make new configuration files for the GNU automake tools, and VERY PATIENTLY showed me how to make them work. The source tarball is no longer a pathetic parody of a source file distribution. Please note - I mistakenly uploaded a version labelled 2.8 to the GForge site. I can't get rid of it; please ignore it. The 2008.x packages labelled 2.8 and 2.7 on the GForge site are actually both 2.7. Here's a list of the changes: Version 2.7: New user features: Monthly moon calendar now uses moon images. Also, both moon calendars now show Blue Moons, using the common definition that a Blue Moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. Enlarged and re-arranged buttons on the opts page, for enhanced finger friendliness. Got rid of stylus mode. The program is always in finger mode now. There was never a significant difference between the two modes anyway. The program now always saves configuration changes in nonvolatile memory. This is the standard behavior for handheld applications. Bug Fixes: Build-related files completely redone so as to use GNU autotools properly. Program no longer crashes if run on a phone who's locale is set to a language which uses a comma for the decimal point. Improved handling of zoom gestures which originate in the panning area. Before this fix, it was difficult or impossible to zoom an area near the horizon, because such a gesture would be interpreted as a press in the panning area, which would call up the azimuth compass. Removed the call to the popt library that parsed the command line arguments. This caused problems, because not all Freerunner software stacks shipped with the popt library. The program now parses its command line arguments with no call to any library. Fixed a bug which made it difficult to use the arrows at the bottom of the monthly moon calendar to change months. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Centralization of graphical awesomeness
DJDAS dj...@djdas.net wrote: [...] I am sure people trying the smoothness and responsiveness of Illume at 240x320 would never complain of a lower resolution! Furthermore I don't understand why a lower resolution (and in this I agree with you people are strange ;) ) would become in an unusable device while the iPhone at the same resolution is the best usable device ;) OK, I was going to try to control myself, but I just can't. I'm one of the people who always pops out of the woodwork to scream when someone suggests that switching to QVGA is a good idea. 1) The iPhone is not QVGA. It's HVGA. Try running a web browser on an iPhone with the bottom half of the display covered with black tape. 2) The Freerunner has one, and ONLY ONE, feature which is somewhat better than what is found on a typical smart phone. The VGA display. You are suggesting that feature should be downgraded so that it is effectively worse than what is found virtually every smart phone being currently manufactured. Every other feature of our phones is either no better than average (the GPS, the accelerometers), worse than average (USB 1.1, GPRS), or fucked up by firmware problems (WiFi). Yes, let's make sure the display is substandard too! Personally, I wish OM had stayed with the UI they had in 2007.1. That's right, 2007.1 - the first version, which had no kinetic scrolling. There was never any chance that OM would produce a phone with graphics as smooth and fancy as what a high-volume smart phone has. They did not have access to the hardware components. They did not have a legion of engineers to work on it.There is even less chance that gta02-core or gta03 will have state-of-the-art graphics capabilities. It will be nothing short of a miracle if a community hardware effort ever produces a usable phone, available to the full OM community, at all. IMO the OM software should try to differentiate our device from other smart phones, not produce a half-assed iPhone clone. Forget smooth graphics. Forget kinetic scrolling. Forget transparency. Show a simple, clean array of icons representing the applications which can be launched. Allow the user to set the brightness, screen blank time and suspend time. Stop there. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Centralization of graphical awesomeness
Gennady Kupava g...@bsdmn.com wrote: [...] Yes, freerunner device is slow, but it is embedded device, and it's impossible to continue kicking glamo which is already dead, as only reason of slowness. People with GTA01 have no glamo and that? Is it better? As far as I know - not. Actually, yes the GTA01 is very noticeably faster in graphics. I've got both, and I've run 'em side-by-side. The glamo actually is a graphics DEcellerator. That's why GTA02-core is kicking it out. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
WikiReader
Xavier Cremaschi wrote: [...] This device gives you : - offline access to Wikipedia - on a cheap device (it could be cheaper if the company were bigger I presume) - which uses AAA batteries, available anywhere in the world. We (US/EU/Jap) almost don't care about these 3 points [...] It will be entertaining if the folks who purchase WikiReaders start hanging out on the Openmoko IRC channel. One set of participants will be blathering on about wpa_supplicant files, and the other will be asking how to insert AAA batteries. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: OpenMoko Cambridge pub meet
Cameron Frazier wrote: umm... Cambridge UK? Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA? Cambridge, Ontario, CA? Other? Not trying to be annoying, it's that if you're meeting in Cambridge, ON, CA, I'd 1) be there, and 2) be impressed! I assume you mean Cambridge, Mass., USA I'm afraid he means *real* Cambridge - as in England. But if he means Cambridge Mass, I'll be a happy guy. Ken Young (in Cambridge, Mass) ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: OM2009
Angus Ainslie Wrote: Now I have a question of all of you. Should I continue to maintain Om2009. From the recent poll by rhk it seems that SHR users outnumber OM users by ~ 7:1. So what I'd like to know is does anyone still think Om2009 is a worthy venture or should I move over to SHR and see what help I can be there. The results of Risto's poll were very surprising, at least to me. Everyone should take a look at it (http://doodle.com/sd2c8d8snr23eeqq). 70+ percent of the participants are using SHR. There really is no second place winner. I think we should all concentrate our efforts on SHR. This should not be interpreted as paroli being abandoned as paroli is in the SHR feeds. I haven't tested it, but getting it to work would be one of my first tasks if it doesn't. paroli has a LOT of fans, and your work on it is greatly appreciated! Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Account at http://projects.openmoko.org/
bumbl...@gmail.com wrote: i would not use projects.openmoko.org as i am not sure wether it is maintained at the moment It does seem to have been abandoned by the maintainer, since there has been no response from him about this issue or the earlier questions about the spam emails coming from the commit lists. Also, project news is no longer being moved to the Latest News section of the home page. Should the administration of that site be passed to someone else?I'd be willing to administer it, if nobody else wants to. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Anti-Whining: Happy Moko Moments
Warren Baird wrote: - I was able to show off the client software from my 'day job' - a quite complex j2se application - running on a cell phone, which definitely impressed people. What are your successes with the Freerunner? With my Freerunner, I am able to control a telescope 5000 miles away, and analyse the data, while I sit in a pizza parlor. It's the high resolution display and the X11 server that lets me do this. There's no way I could do it with my Android G1 phone. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
RE: GOT MY PHONE!!! :) Doesn't work... :(
ET wrote: OK, this is part of the problem (I think) My sim card is: 63513G 300164k smartchip does not respond to at+cimi Which is listed as: SIM cards that don't work with original gsm firmware Now, I read it somewhere, but how do I open an SSH session into this thing so I can follow those steps? How do I get a keyboard on the screen? Thanks! ET You might want to ask questions like this on the openmoko IRC channel. There's nothing wrong with sending them to this list, but if you're having problems just getting started, I'll bet you'll find getting help on the IRC channel to be more efficient. Glad you got your phone! Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: YOUR action is needed to get the Community Updates up running again
Risto H. Kurppa ri...@kurppa.fi wrote: I started the draft page here for the next updates: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Updates/June_25%2C_2009 Please add there everything that's happened since May 22nd. Thanks very much for picking up the ball on this, Risto. I agree that the Community Updates are one of the most important features of the wiki. If they stop coming out, the project will really look moribund. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
[orrery] new version (2.6) available
If Sean is ever to begin receiving daily orders for pallets of 50,000 3G-enabled Freerunners, certain core applications must be attractive, quickly responsive, and absolutely bullet proof. We all know what these applications are: Dialer, Contacts, Meteor Shower Information, SMS Messaging and Calendar.Let's be frank - Meteor Shower Information has long been the weak link in the Freerunner's PIM (Planet Information Management) software suite. This has been, I believe, one of the biggest barriers to mainstream consumer acceptance of the phone. Well no more. A new version of the orrery program (version 2.6) is available which provides several essential pieces of information about meteor showers. It puts YOU, the Freerunner owner, in charge of your nightly meteor watching activities. Version 2.6: New user features: Added meteor shower information. There is now a page under the opts menu which gives information about all meteor showers for the year (the year can be changed with the time menu, of course). Things such as the dates of the showers, the maximum rate of meteors per hour, the phase of the moon for each shower's peak and the number of dark hours, are shown. Also shown is the number of dark hours for the next or current night. The items menu allows you to specify that meteor radiants for currently active showers should be plotted on the sky display. The radiant position moves against the background stars as the shower progresses. Added a way to change the sky display's center azimuth quickly. Now, if you tap the center of the pan area or press (long tap) anywhere in the pan area, a compass will appear which will allow you to select a new center azimuth with your finger or stylus. When you release pressure on the screen, the display will be redrawn with the selected azimuth at the center.You can still pan in the old way by tapping in the panning area (bottom 1/5 of the screen). Bug Fixes: Fixed a bug which prevented fullscreen mode and flashlights from working under SHR. Fixed nonstandard date display The new version is available here: http://projects.openmoko.org/frs/download.php/778/orrery_2.6_arm_2008.8.ipk I thank the International Meteor Organization (http://www.imo.net/imo/intro) for permission to use their data to produce the meteor shower related displays. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Survey about the Touchscreen
Denis Galvo wrote: Really, we don't need a hi res screen on a day by day gadget I could not possibly disagree more strongly. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Survey about the Touchscreen
Denis Galvao wrote: On 21/11/2008, at 13:20, Ken Young wrote: Really, we don't need a hi res screen on a day by day gadget I could not possibly disagree more strongly. So, give me a reason where you will need that. As long as we have at least a VGA resolution screen, it is relatively easy for us to port linux desktop applications to the Openmoko phones. Once we drop down to HVGA, or (heaven forbid!) QVGA, there will need to be extensive UI redesign to get most apps. from the desktop world to run on an OM phone, especially when a soft keyboard is needed. So reducing the resolution will greatly reduce the code base we can leverage. In addition, I don't think you can ever had too many pixels on a machine you intend to run a web browser on. Right now, when I show someone my Freerunner, the only thing that impresses them is the display. It would be a shame if OM dropped the one part of its hardware that is actually superior to what is found on other smartphones. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Android open sourced
Jim Morris wrote: [...] Ya know I don't really care if it is open source or free source or commercial, so long as it is stable and actually works as a phone! I have a $400 toy at the moment which I would like to use as a phone one day. I'll use anything that gets me closer to that goal. Does anyone really think that porting Android is going to magically fix the problems that prevent the Freerunner from being a useful phone? How likely is it that things like suspend/resume problems will go away if you port Android? Aren't those problems apt to be very closely tied to the particulars of the Freerunner hardware? Porting Android sounds to me like a way to spend a huge amount of time to produce another distribution for the Freerunner which will be no more reliable (at best) than the others ones are. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Back to the basics: improving user experience
John Lee wrote: Hi, Like Wolfgang said in http://n2.nabble.com/Weekly-Engineering-News-41-2008-td1336450.html We assembled a team to focus on improving the user experience. Here is our todo list at the moment: [...] I would like to ask the community: What do you want us to work on? For my 2 cents, I'd suggest that OM choose one distribution, either 2008.x or (more likely) FSO, and concentrate on getting basic phone and SMS functionality, with suspend/resume, to work very reliably on that distribution. Until that is done, I'd recommend ignoring everything else. Unless the Freerunner works as a phone, the thing is just a toy for nerds no matter how wonderfully anything else might work on it. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Reason for GPS problems found!
Joerg Reisenweber (joerg at openmoko.org) wrote: wrong! won't help, don't try! /j That's a bit cryptic - what are you saying is wrong? It it the idea of removing the shielding, or the claim that the GPS performance improves dramatically if the microSD card is removed? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
GPS
thomasg wrote: This all are no arguments. With my TomTom device I can do a full reset so that no GPS data is available at all (also no time and so on) and still get a fix in 3 minutes at 100 km/h. Well, I know the freerunner is no specialized gps navigation device, but the fact that the signals are so weak that it's barely possible to get a fix under optimal condition (clear view to the sky, antenna on top, without moving 1 mm) shows, that this is no simple software problem and has to be fixed. The GPS performance of my Freerunner is also much worse than the GPS performance of my neo1973. I've done side-by-side tests of the two units many times. My neo1973 gets a good fix in 2 to 3 minutes after a completely cold start; it's very reliable. My Freerunner initially was getting a fix after 7 or 8 minutes. For the last few days it has not been able to get a fix at all. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
GPS
Ole Kliemann wrote: Funny... my experience has been completely contrary to this. When I first tried GPS, it got a fix within minutes at the open window. I then installed gpsdrive and did some other stuff. I did not get a fix anymore. I undid the software changes by starting from a fresh reflash. But i never got a fix again. Today I tried outside 15min with antenna faced skywards. agpsui signal strength display did not show any activity. Don't know it made it work the very first time. I had a similar experience with my Freerunner. I initially installed only gpsd and tangogps. I reliably got a fix within about 7 minutes at least half a dozen times. It never failed completely. Then I installed and ran openmoko-agpsui. My unit has not managed to sync up with even a single satellite since then, dispite my sitting around with it for several hours in an open area. In desperation, I re-flashed the kernel and rootfs, and again installed only gpsd and tangogps for GPS software. No joy. The GPS init now seems completely nonfunctional. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
US Shipping
McCreery, Lee CTR DISA wrote: Steve sent a mail to the list last night that they had issue at warehouse that held things up. They think they have worked them out and should start shipping today. I have not received and shipment information thus far...Order # 1356. The subject line of Steve's post was Phones are headed out of fremont CA. which suggets that shipping began yesterday. For what it's worth, I've heard nothing either (order 1367). Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
HP calculator on neo1973 - was: More HW from Openmoko
Rodolphe Ortalo wrote: Btw, are there any licensing issues with this emulator? No. The emulator is open source, and the source code contains the statement: * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or * (at your option) any later version. The calculator ROM images are a different story, but I'm not modifying them. They are available several places on the web. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Error while paying
Federico Lorenzi wrote: Hi, I get a gateway error from hitrust when attempting to pay. anyone know what the problem is? I get this error too. It is Gateway Error 500, for whatever that's worth. I was tryig to order an 850 MHz 10-pack, with expedited shipping. I tried placing the order with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Same error each time. Does anyone know what's going wrong? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Error while paying
Peter Naulls wrote: Me too, but I called up Chase, and they took off the block on international purchases. So that is the 10 pack for San Diego group buy - still need 2-3 more people for it, I don't want to end up with 4 phones ;-) Citibank did this too. So Gateway Error 500 is Hi Trust's way of saying Credit Card Declined. I called Citibank, got them to lift the block, and the transaction went through smoothly after that. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
More HW from OpenMoko
Rodolphe Ortalo: Given the freerunner hw, you can certainly do much better than that! I would expect something like mathematica in your pocket... ;-) The neo1973 has ~8 times the floating point performance of a VAX 11/780 (double precision). The initial version of Mathematica was developed on a VAX 11/750 - the Freerunner should be about 20 times faster than that machine in floating point. It was also rare to run across an 11/750 with more than 4 MByte of RAM. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)
Chris Write wrote: Using a terminal emulator would be far more pleasant with the higher resolution screen, but you're not going to get an 80x25 window in there; with a 640x480 display plus an on-screen keyboard, you're going to have either an 80x30 or so window in portrait mode and an unreadable font, or you're going to get about 80x15 in landscape. This is not correct. The pssh application for a Palm Treo can produce a 80x25 terminal emulator with a full on-screen keyboard. It is hard to read, but definately usable. I use it daily (although almost always without the on-screen keyboard - then you get 80x47). The Treo's screen is only 320x320, so the Freerunner should be able to produce a 80x25 portrait window with on-screen keyboard and a fairly nice font. To those who argue that the ~150 DPI resolution one would get with QVGA on the '03 is nearly indistiguishable from the VGA resolution on a 2.8 screen I ask: When was the last time you saw a 150 DPI laser printer? Why are they so hard to find? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
GTA03 speculation [UNOFFICIAL]
Ron K. Jeffries wrote: GTA03 is a fairly small re-spin of GTA02. They are not doing anything very risky. The biggest change is a new GSM radio that supports EDGE, which is much faster than GPRS that GTA02 has. Do we know if the problem which reduced the number of usable GSM frequencies from four to three will be fixed on the GTA03? To me, that seems like at least as big a problem as the Glamo. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 07:57:13AM +0800, Carsten Haitzler wrote: the day the design mockups for the ui i see stop having alpha transparency is the day i make this unimportant. until that day, your i don't care about this is the kind of opinion that i also am not interested in, because i am being shown ui designs hat REQUIRE it in the long run between windows, and in the short term is being faked with software within windows. i am just trying to make something possible that is being requested, and has been for a long time. not just say i don't care. The problem isn't that transparency effects, and other CPU/GPU intensitve UI enhancements, are unimportant. On a handheld device they *are* important.They make the device worse.It is important to resist the push to add eye-candy to a handheld device, because every CPU/GPU cycle spent animating an icon, or making a window translucent, eats some of the energy stored in your battery, and reduces the amount of useful work which can be done between recharges. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
[no subject]
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: this is a core part of my point. i stare at this screen every day. i know its dpi. most people imho will never make use of such a dpi as they literally can't see it - they will NEED to use much bigger fonts just to see something other than a blur. thus the resolution usefulness degrades rapidly. the but i can't do 80x24 without vga is moot as it is a blur, unless you go up to a font size where all you can fit is 60 wide or less. I stare at my neo1973, which has the same screen, every day. I also use a Treo 700p daily. The treo has a 320 x 320 pixel screen, which is larger than QVGA. If I run the terminal application which comes with the neo's gtk software stack, switch to landscape orientation, go to full screen and reduce the font size by two zoom levels, I have a terminal application which will show 85 columns with 25 lines, and a perfectly legible font. The difference between the neo's display and my Treo's display (which can display 80 columns with a 4 pixel wide font) IS DRAMATIC. This is not a case of the VGA screen looking a little better. This is not me kidding myself about the quality of my eyesight. There is a dramatic difference between VGA and QVGA. I wish I knew how to take a screenshot off of my Treo. I'd set up a wiki page with the images, and then there would be no more discussion of this, I think. Anyone with decent eyesight would see the difference. If someone can email me with instructions about how to do a screen grab with PalmOS, I'll make a comparison page. maybe it just needs people to actually use it for a while and they might begin to see that a lower res screen may just be fine and not as bad as they think. the things you want to do are possible at lower resolutions. I'd venture to guess that most of the people on this list who have posted an opinion about this have used cell phones with lower resolution screens. I have - I use one every day. Do you really think the consumers who are afflicted with featuritis, who care only about bragging to their friends about how slick there phones are, are hanging around waiting for the Freerunner? Take a look at the iphone which was anounced yesterday. Its hardware is superior, in every aspect (except the screen, but you appear to be working on fixing that) to the Freerunner's. It costs $199 (I know Apple extracts money later via the service contract). Anyone with even the mildest case of featuritis is going to buy something like *that*. The people who are going to buy the Freerunner are persons who want to see cell phones take a different path.And, though this sounds pretentious, I think the people who are reading the OM discussion lists, waiting impatiently to buy a Freerunner, know a lot more about cell phones than the average consumer.If these people are telling you they want VGA, not QVGA, I don't think you should just assume they have no idea what they really want. browsing full web pages scrammed into a 2.8 screen as many have suggested, is really... pushing such a tiny screen far beyond its usefulness. web pages are designed for 14 or 17 screens or so. squeezing them down into 2.8 is nigh madness. it's possible - but vga vs qvga there isn't the factor (imho) :) Why is it that viewing web pages, which are designed for 14 or 17 screens is nigh madness, but viewing videos or movies, which are designed for even larger displays, somehow makes sense to you? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions
Stroller wrote: Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here. Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations? Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we don't care a heck for it. Amen to that! Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone, but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the mobile phone market? This is especially true because if the GTA03 tries to be an iPhone clone, it will be at best a half-assed iPhone clone. The hardware just isn't competitive with an iPhone's. If the GTA03 has QVGA, will it have fast 3G networking? No. Will it have a state-of-the-art SoC? No. That's not to say the GTA03 will be a bad device. There's a lot of very exciting things you can do with the Freerunner hardware. But it's just stupid to try to imitate the slick, largely useless, graphics goodies found on high-end video feature phones. It is also a little alarming to hear that alpha blending is even being discussed by corporate OM personnel, when you consider the state of the current OM software stack. I don't think OM should target consumers who care about watching videos and having slick graphics at all. They should go after uses of Palm and RIM products, who will be attracted to a rich ecosystem of useful 3rd party applications, and a phone geared towards letting professional people get some work done. There are not nearly so many of those people as there are Apple fanboys, but they are willing to part with serious money to get the best phone for their work and hobbies. Think Differently! -- Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: i know: 1. u may need to scroll more 2. viewing of images/data that just have more pixel content will need to be zoomed out and have less display fidelity 3. some things requiring text displays like 80x24 terminals will be not readable at all at font sizes able to fit on the display (they will jut blur away all character details). with almost everything i can think of you can get by qvga by: 1. scaling data 2. changing font sizes 3. re-arranging ui elements etc. no matter what you need to do this even for vga - if coming fro xga land or better. it's just a more extreme case. If you are going to demand an example of an application which simply cannot be run on a QVGA screen, no matter how bad the user experience would be, then I guess people will have a hard time coming up with one. The same would be true of a 100 x 100 pixel screen. You could just scroll and scroll and scroll some more, and do what you need to do. You could just demand that everyone re-write their applications to accomodate a screen that is very small. We could all switch to reading text in Braille, whose characters can be displayed in a smaller cell than the fonts sighted persons usually use. But the question should not be Can you give me an example of something which can be done with a VGA screen but which absolutely cannot be done with a QVGA screen?. The question should be Are you willing to give up the benefits of a VGA screen in order to have smooth animation and fast video on a QVGA screen, and a lower cost?. It seems to me that the vast majority of the people who have reponded here have said no, that's a poor engineering trade off. In fact, I don't think even one person has responded that, for them, that trade off would be a good one. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)
Carsten Haitzler [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: but as i said - i'm just looking to see what people think. and why. i'm very interested in why. why is a vga screen so important? can you REALLY see all the pixels? can you REALLY read an 8-point font on that screen at that size? (be honest!). from what i notice of people such a font is just a blurry mess to them and they are always increasing font sizes to be able to read anything, thus why spend so many pixels on it? but if you really can see that well - it does make sense. at least if u are always looking at static content. i content moves/animates, it's useless again. Personally, I could care less if the OM phones never have the capability to play video at all. I must use my smart phone to provide remote assistance for an astronomical observatory after normal working hours. I need to be able to run applications that show 80 column text displays. Believe it or not, pssh on a Treo with a 320x320 display can actually display 80 columns of text without scrolling, but the font is challenging to read, to say the least. What I can't do on my Treo is display the output of our spectrometer. There just aren't enough pixels. But it is possible to observe the spectrometer output on the neo1973. It's extremely cool - the neo1973 is all you need to successfully control and monitor a 360 ton telescope thousands of miles away. My ancient eyes barely have the ability to focus at all, but my eyesight is nearly perfect for an object 15 cm in front of my face. I can definitely see a big difference in image quality between photos displayed on my 320x320 pixel Treo, and the neo1973. The neo's display is far superior. I can see pixelation on my Treo very clearly, but not on the neo. I really, honest-to-god, can see the difference when I put them down in front of me, side by side. I'd be happy to pay $300 more for a phone just to have VGA instead of QVGA. If QVGA is to be offered on a low-end OM phone, that's great, as long as OM still offers higher resolution on their more expensive products. But I'd be very sad to see OM's flagship phone, which already has some pretty outdated features such as USB 1.1 and a rather old ARM core, drop its resolution below that found on many (most?) modern smart phones. I'm happy to trade off some degree of hardware obsolescence for openness, but surely the hardware platform shouldn't be moving *backwards*. Otherwise, why not just restart the production line for the Greenphone? Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Yummy new CPU/GPU combo
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: quick question - would you prefer a qvga lcd (save a bit of cost) since we'e going to need to software-drive all graphics - the fewer pixels you have to fill, the better for speed. i'm really tossing up if the speed of qvga is worth the loss of resolution. i'm just not sure. Please, please, please, please, please don't drop to a QVGA LCD on future OM phones. The beautiful full VGA screens on the neo and Freerunner are just about the only piece of hardware they have which is better than what you find on a typical smart phone. Ken Young ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Got my phone! + A comment and a Question
I got my phone, and I'm a happy guy! I learned one thing that might save someone else some time. I initially tried to do the dfu-util downloads of the kernel and rootfs from linux running via VMWare on a Windoze host. Although dfu-util definately could talk to the neo, it could not successfully download the images. Once I switched to a native linux box (running exactly the same OS version) I had no problems. Something that worries me is that at the end of the Getting Started with your Neo1973 page in the wiki, it suggests backing up the original flash contents, because ... there are parts in the root filesystem that can't be distributed over internet so they are only found in the shipped ROM (see the GPS driver). Now these first neos have been shipped with no rootfs at all (see wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/SH1). So we *have* to overwrite the rootfs before the device will boot. What does that mean vis a vis the parts of the filesystem which can't be distributed over the internet?How do we get those parts? Ken Young Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory 60 Garden Street, MS 78 Phoney Dolson has a secret name. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA (617) 495-7330 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Not the free phone
How 'bout For those who prefer JTAG to Bluetooth. or It's not just a phone, it's a hobby. or Get one before the phone companies figure out what they are. ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Problem with emial order confirmation
I ordered the neo1973 on the first day the openmoko.com site went live. Today I received a message, saying that to confirm the order, I must reply to the email with a message containing (as the first characters of an otherwise empty line) the string YES_I_DO . However, when I sent that reply, the email bounced back with a subject line Message not recorded and a text body saying Permission Denied. Is this happening to other customers too? If not, can anyone hazard a guess about why I can't send email to openmoko.com, even as a reply to a message they sent me? I have found that if I send an email without the order information in the subject line, the email does not bounce (but nobody replies either). But messages with the special subject string they say to use in corespondences about my order always bounce. Have I been blacklisted? ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
