Re: Questions and Answers
On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:13:45 +0100 Marco Trevisan (Treviño) m...@3v1n0.net babbled: Let me give everyone a bit more background into the keypad issue. We first saw the Qtopia predictive keypad back in February of 2008, and became extremely exited. This keypad, we believed, had the potential to become better than anything on the market. Yes, it was... We asked Raster to integrate this keypad into Om 2008 and extend it to make it more hacker friendly (i.e., usable from places like the terminal). After two months of more or less silence he showed us his own version, written from scratch. The design was a work in progress. And the dictionary was far inferior to what Qtopia had already. An internal battle started that lasted until one month before Om 2008 was set to be released when our product manager, Will Lai, couldn't take it anymore. He asked another engineer to just get the Qtopia keypad working. Ok, I understand this. But, why have you asked Raster to improve a thing (like qtopia-x11) that should have been only a kind of placeholder? Wasn't it considered in a such way at that time? I always thought that the future of Openmoko was going to reach the Framework, and also if qtopia could be adapted to use it, we all know that its performances under X aren't the ones that we can bear. At that point Raster's keypad was getting stable. It had many new features. But basic text entry was still not as good as Qtopia's. Major parts of Om 2008, in the meantime, were still not finished (like the Glamo or network manager). Openmoko (the company) needs to focus on simplifying. We need to limit ourselves to building what doesn't already exist. We cannot constantly try to build better components from scratch. Our resources are just too limited for that. Openmoko is trying to repackage the essentials (just enough) to make people feel inspired. What's not there is often times more inspiring than what is there. I emailed Raster, the other day, asking if my current perspective corresponds with his. The main motivation for writing a new keypad from scratch, he said, had to do with his ability to (easily) extend Qtopia's code. C++ and qt were not familiar to him. And he wanted something with more configuration options. To get there with Qtopia, he thought, would take more time then writing a new one from scratch. So reading this I only think that what Raster said was not only true about the implementation difficulties, but also about the fact that at that time we needed something that should have survived to Om2008. The keyboard he wrote is actually what the future seems to reserve to us and also if it has some issues with accented words (maybe fixed in svn r38274?!?) and it performs worse with big dictionaries than the Qtopia predictive, I figure that he did the right move. So maybe what happened wasn't in the spirit of the backs to the basics, but he lead us the best input method available today. since what i wrote really got distilled down and lost a lot of details and info - i'll quote myself here on the keyboard issue: ok - here's my take: looked at qtopia keyboard code. it's c++ and qt - not too familiar with qt but readable. looked at code (very much qt/qws centric) and its all integrated into the 1 big qpe process. it has no ability to change layout from config nor anything to support using a terminal. we also will depend on a external app that does phone handling for the most rudimentary of things. while it worked well for english text input ONCe you learnt how to use it (someone told you the tricks) it lacked: ease of discoverability (how do i enter space? how do i type the return key? where are numbers? what happened to ctrl and alt? how do i do backspace? etc.) there were a list of ui issues that i knew would be top of the complaints list - they were already on the top of mine. now figuring the work needed to add all of this and fix it vs. re-implementing - i chose to re-implement given all the above concerns (it only took about 3 weeks for the first cut - i was busy doing all sorts of other things at the same time, not just keyboard). so the work to fix it vs. the code to re-implement with all the other bits done better. i chose the latter as i saw it as a faster way to get to thew right solution. in the end qtopia was meant to be a TEMPORARY solution until FSO was done - and thus there would need to be a new keyboard implemented anyway later so work would be duplicated probably by the same person - me. so instead of doing it twice - did it once. there were enough other unsolved problems at the time - like how do i request a keyboard as an app properly? (the matchbox protocol had holes you can drive a truck through to cause problems so i ended up implementing that for compatibility, but also a newer protocol involving properties). also how to select from one of N installed keyboards and manage the running,
Re: Questions and Answers
Le dimanche 04 janvier 2009, Sean Moss-Pultz a écrit : Now we're again struggling with closed firmwares (both the Calypso and the Atheros module). I would love to just make our own WiFi chip, but Openmoko doesn't have the volume to return our investment in such a technology endeavor. Hello Sean, I always wondered why you were not reusing XO's wifi chip subsystem (Marvell 88W8388) ? OLPC has already mesh networking and I guess good integration in the kernel. Too expensive, proprietary, complicated ? Minh -- Minh HA DUONG, Chargé de Recherche, CNRS CIRED, Centre International de Recherches sur l'Environnement et le Développement http://minh.haduong.com ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
On 1/4/09 Minh Ha Duong wrote: Le dimanche 04 janvier 2009, Sean Moss-Pultz a écrit : Now we're again struggling with closed firmwares (both the Calypso and the Atheros module). I would love to just make our own WiFi chip, but Openmoko doesn't have the volume to return our investment in such a technology endeavor. Hello Sean, I always wondered why you were not reusing XO's wifi chip subsystem (Marvell 88W8388) ? OLPC has already mesh networking and I guess good integration in the kernel. Too expensive, proprietary, complicated ? Too big :/ OLPC uses the 8388 chipset. We needed to use the 8686 or the newer (bluetooth+wifi) 8688 variant. Those are built for mobile phones. -Sean ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
On 1/3/09 Lee Grime wrote: I come from a hardware background, chip design mainly, but analogue (note the spelling :-) ) and DSP(MSc) are still strong points. Done chip design for 15 years. Now I do not have a great deal of time at the moment, what with a 3 week old baby and stuff!, but if we can get a few other like minded people together, I am sure we can produce our own open source SoC. And if the credit crunch kicks in properly, even more time. I have heard all about the problems with the crappy Glamo chip. Why not have a small CPLD as a co-processor, into which we load a 'codec' for whatever we are doing at the time, say mp3 decoding, or some video codec. We can get cheap and low power enough CPLD's or FPGA's these days to perform this job. Lets make this thing really open. Could even do the GSM part open source. No more problems with NDA's etc. If you can get to 100K units our own ASIC should become viable. Lee Congratulations on your new kid! About a year ago we were in contact with a Taiwanese University / Government project to build a DSP for mobile devices. We got the point where they would make everything open, but in the end we decided not to move forward since the resources required to turn it into a product were just too great. Now we're again struggling with closed firmwares (both the Calypso and the Atheros module). I would love to just make our own WiFi chip, but Openmoko doesn't have the volume to return our investment in such a technology endeavor. Hopefully this doesn't persuade you not to try. Maybe you could pull it off and we could use your chip in a later product :-) Happy New Year. -Sean ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
Hi Marco On 1/3/09 Marco Trevisan (Treviño) wrote: We asked Raster to integrate this keypad into Om 2008 and extend it to make it more hacker friendly (i.e., usable from places like the terminal). After two months of more or less silence he showed us his own version, written from scratch. The design was a work in progress. And the dictionary was far inferior to what Qtopia had already. An internal battle started that lasted until one month before Om 2008 was set to be released when our product manager, Will Lai, couldn't take it anymore. He asked another engineer to just get the Qtopia keypad working. Ok, I understand this. But, why have you asked Raster to improve a thing (like qtopia-x11) that should have been only a kind of placeholder? Wasn't it considered in a such way at that time? For the same reason we used Qtopia in the first place: We needed to balance the long term goals of the project with the short term necessity of making enough money to stay in business. This is always a difficult tradeoff to make. Happy New Year. -Sean ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
JW wrote: Sean Kudos to you for your openness about the status of Openmoko Inc and the future roadmap, the numbers so far and future ambitions.Also for your hints about some of the hard decisions and pain along the way. :-) Its no small achievement to take this start up to the stage where it can look forward to improving existing software stacks based on solid FSO middleware and future product releases given these tough economic times and all in the community will be pleased to hear that this can be the case. Yes. We're all very excited about FSO. I think it will allow us to really differentiate. Having been part of product dev previously I am very forgiving of the hw and sw bumps in the road that are inevitable - keep up the good work! I will buy another Openmoko phone as soon as the next one is released. Thanks for all your support! -Sean PS: Citysense is very cool! ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Questions and Answers
Dear Community Here are my answers to your great questions: Q1. The end of the year is a time to look back on the year achievements. So where does Openmoko stands now from a business point of view ? Could you comment on sustainability, on sales numbers, on geographic markets and customer categories ? Let me begin by addressing the market aspects of the question, because I find this part more fundamental. Openmoko was built from the tools and knowledge of the Internet. Our argument for the necessity of an open phone stems from an observation that the Internet breaks down mass markets by making it economically attractive for companies to address niche market segments. We saw a real business opportunity caused by this divergence. So we set out to build a product capable of allowing a company to reach out to its customers and allowing its customers to talk back and to talk to each other. This product was the Neo 1973. We pioneered a new breed of Consumer Electronics companies. The products we build expand our community. The expanded community makes for better products and more sales. Ad infinitum. Perhaps one day people will look back and call such corporate and community teamwork the first, of many, Social Electronics companies. FreeRunner, our major product milestone of 2008, started selling in July. We were more conservative this time with our launch. There were no pre-orders. We sold first through distributors. Our own order processing was entirely automated. Last time it was (painfully) manual. I hope everyone who reads this list will appreciate how much effort FreeRunner took. Openmoko is a very small company. We succeeded in building a smartphone only because we didn't have enough experienced people to tell us that it couldn't be done. While far better than the Neo 1973, FreeRunner had its share of problems. The ancient TI Calypso had registration and SIM card compatibility issues. Audio quality, while slowly improving, still is not perfect. But I can accept these growing pains. We are improving. We are much better than our last product. And community effects continue to materialize in mind-blowing ways. (I will never forget the speed at which we all fixed the GPS issue.) Back to the Basics was our response to your public and private comments. We continue to refocus internal efforts around these ideas. Paroli represents a phone application with a feature set reduced to the bare minimum that is still useful. FSO is our base that will let you easily build what you want. The entire system is becoming more stable as we increase our efforts to have our kernel downloadable from kernel.org. Our technology plan is stabilized at this point. Development priorities for the next six months are clear. Openmoko's goal can be written in one sentence: We want to build consumer products that package the best parts of the FOSS world into products that are relevant and inspiring to ordinary people. Inspiring is the key part of this goal in my mind. Here's a list, off the top of my head, of the things we've inspired to date: * A small project inside of FIC to become an independent company * 24 distributors around the world to join us in getting our products to more people * The development of entire distributions (as opposed to just applications) * Industrial designers to remix our CAD files * A very interesting Framework initiative * A documentation list with the most amazing Community Update emails Using inspiration as a metric, without a doubt, Openmoko was a massive success in 2008. If you want to compare us to Apple and their iPhone I would be flattered, but I also think it's a strange comparison. We are very a small company. Sales are just enough (around 10,000 to date) to survive. Apple has been around for 30 years - Openmoko just under two. I'm extremely excited about our position going into 2009. At the same time, I'm very realistic about the road we are traveling. Success will take everything we've got. Q2. The god of January has two faces, one looking back and one looking forward, so... Juergen, Eric in Japan and practically everybody else want to know when will the GTA03 phone be released, if it will have 3G/3.5G, a camera and the kitchen sink. Can you tell us anything yet? Where do you want Openmoko to be in December 2009? We sold the FreeRunner based on Openness alone in 2008. We had no real competition in the marketplace. We were very lucky. But times are changing. Go ask your non-developer friends what's the most open phone in the world. They'll say the iPhone or G1. At least that's what I'm hearing. Nobody will doubt the value of openness for the mobile industry anymore. This seems like good news at first glance. But what openness are they talking about? Look around and you'll find it's pretty different than what we've been talking about. Yes, the very definition of openness is changing. This troubles me because we cannot influence markets with our
Re: Questions and Answers
Sean, I come from a hardware background, chip design mainly, but analogue (note the spelling :-) ) and DSP(MSc) are still strong points. Done chip design for 15 years. Now I do not have a great deal of time at the moment, what with a 3 week old baby and stuff!, but if we can get a few other like minded people together, I am sure we can produce our own open source SoC. And if the credit crunch kicks in properly, even more time. I have heard all about the problems with the crappy Glamo chip. Why not have a small CPLD as a co-processor, into which we load a 'codec' for whatever we are doing at the time, say mp3 decoding, or some video codec. We can get cheap and low power enough CPLD's or FPGA's these days to perform this job. Lets make this thing really open. Could even do the GSM part open source. No more problems with NDA's etc. If you can get to 100K units our own ASIC should become viable. What do you think? Lee. On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 07:11 +0800, Sean Moss-Pultz wrote: Dear Community Here are my answers to your great questions: Q1. The end of the year is a time to look back on the year achievements. So where does Openmoko stands now from a business point of view ? Could you comment on sustainability, on sales numbers, on geographic markets and customer categories ? Let me begin by addressing the market aspects of the question, because I find this part more fundamental. Openmoko was built from the tools and knowledge of the Internet. Our argument for the necessity of an open phone stems from an observation that the Internet breaks down mass markets by making it economically attractive for companies to address niche market segments. We saw a real business opportunity caused by this divergence. So we set out to build a product capable of allowing a company to reach out to its customers and allowing its customers to talk back and to talk to each other. This product was the Neo 1973. We pioneered a new breed of Consumer Electronics companies. The products we build expand our community. The expanded community makes for better products and more sales. Ad infinitum. Perhaps one day people will look back and call such corporate and community teamwork the first, of many, Social Electronics companies. FreeRunner, our major product milestone of 2008, started selling in July. We were more conservative this time with our launch. There were no pre-orders. We sold first through distributors. Our own order processing was entirely automated. Last time it was (painfully) manual. I hope everyone who reads this list will appreciate how much effort FreeRunner took. Openmoko is a very small company. We succeeded in building a smartphone only because we didn't have enough experienced people to tell us that it couldn't be done. While far better than the Neo 1973, FreeRunner had its share of problems. The ancient TI Calypso had registration and SIM card compatibility issues. Audio quality, while slowly improving, still is not perfect. But I can accept these growing pains. We are improving. We are much better than our last product. And community effects continue to materialize in mind-blowing ways. (I will never forget the speed at which we all fixed the GPS issue.) Back to the Basics was our response to your public and private comments. We continue to refocus internal efforts around these ideas. Paroli represents a phone application with a feature set reduced to the bare minimum that is still useful. FSO is our base that will let you easily build what you want. The entire system is becoming more stable as we increase our efforts to have our kernel downloadable from kernel.org. Our technology plan is stabilized at this point. Development priorities for the next six months are clear. Openmoko's goal can be written in one sentence: We want to build consumer products that package the best parts of the FOSS world into products that are relevant and inspiring to ordinary people. Inspiring is the key part of this goal in my mind. Here's a list, off the top of my head, of the things we've inspired to date: * A small project inside of FIC to become an independent company * 24 distributors around the world to join us in getting our products to more people * The development of entire distributions (as opposed to just applications) * Industrial designers to remix our CAD files * A very interesting Framework initiative * A documentation list with the most amazing Community Update emails Using inspiration as a metric, without a doubt, Openmoko was a massive success in 2008. If you want to compare us to Apple and their iPhone I would be flattered, but I also think it's a strange comparison. We are very a small company. Sales are just enough (around 10,000 to date) to survive. Apple has been around for 30 years - Openmoko just under two. I'm extremely excited about our position going into 2009. At the same time,
Re: Questions and Answers
On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:50:14 +0100 Lee Grime lee.gr...@gmail.com babbled: or... use something programmable like the omap3 series that comes with a dsp to offload work to - arm has been working on doing cortex a9 which is multi-core. forget glamo. it's legacy. if you are talking of doing an SoC you are in for a hard time. i just did some benchmarks of tro650 vs gta02 vs beagleboard vs desktop in software rendering: http://www.rasterman.com/ as you can see - focusing on glamo and fixing it is not goign to net you anything. just using a modern SoC netted an average gain of about 4-5x the speed. and it's not even at its rated 600mhz and with slower ram. i'd expect a good 15-30% up from that just for a production version (ie 600mhz and decent speed ram). and thats not including any neon optimisations. i have that on my todo list now i have silicon to play with. you can go into details of the glamo if you want.. but it'll just rehash things. the future for graphics is not discrete chips doing it - but cores on your SoC. the 3530 has a fast cpu core - fast memory bust with even an l2 cache - AND it even has a (closed) 3d core (SGX). the cpu alone is fast enough to do nice gfx on at the resolutions you'd expect on a phone - throw in the dsp and you're sailing along. producing your own SoC is likely going to net you something that maybe in 5 years approximates the SoC's of 5 years ago in power consumption and performance. if you want a solution and want it in a reasonable time - simply a better SoC is the go. (what you want exists already in production - just a matter of using it :)) Sean, I come from a hardware background, chip design mainly, but analogue (note the spelling :-) ) and DSP(MSc) are still strong points. Done chip design for 15 years. Now I do not have a great deal of time at the moment, what with a 3 week old baby and stuff!, but if we can get a few other like minded people together, I am sure we can produce our own open source SoC. And if the credit crunch kicks in properly, even more time. I have heard all about the problems with the crappy Glamo chip. Why not have a small CPLD as a co-processor, into which we load a 'codec' for whatever we are doing at the time, say mp3 decoding, or some video codec. We can get cheap and low power enough CPLD's or FPGA's these days to perform this job. Lets make this thing really open. Could even do the GSM part open source. No more problems with NDA's etc. If you can get to 100K units our own ASIC should become viable. What do you think? Lee. On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 07:11 +0800, Sean Moss-Pultz wrote: Dear Community Here are my answers to your great questions: Q1. The end of the year is a time to look back on the year achievements. So where does Openmoko stands now from a business point of view ? Could you comment on sustainability, on sales numbers, on geographic markets and customer categories ? Let me begin by addressing the market aspects of the question, because I find this part more fundamental. Openmoko was built from the tools and knowledge of the Internet. Our argument for the necessity of an open phone stems from an observation that the Internet breaks down mass markets by making it economically attractive for companies to address niche market segments. We saw a real business opportunity caused by this divergence. So we set out to build a product capable of allowing a company to reach out to its customers and allowing its customers to talk back and to talk to each other. This product was the Neo 1973. We pioneered a new breed of Consumer Electronics companies. The products we build expand our community. The expanded community makes for better products and more sales. Ad infinitum. Perhaps one day people will look back and call such corporate and community teamwork the first, of many, Social Electronics companies. FreeRunner, our major product milestone of 2008, started selling in July. We were more conservative this time with our launch. There were no pre-orders. We sold first through distributors. Our own order processing was entirely automated. Last time it was (painfully) manual. I hope everyone who reads this list will appreciate how much effort FreeRunner took. Openmoko is a very small company. We succeeded in building a smartphone only because we didn't have enough experienced people to tell us that it couldn't be done. While far better than the Neo 1973, FreeRunner had its share of problems. The ancient TI Calypso had registration and SIM card compatibility issues. Audio quality, while slowly improving, still is not perfect. But I can accept these growing pains. We are improving. We are much better than our last product. And community effects continue to materialize in mind-blowing ways. (I will never forget the speed at which we all fixed the GPS issue.) Back to the Basics was our response to your
Re: Questions and Answers
Sean Moss-Pultz wrote: Q5. Kosa and Marco wondered if you could say us something about the management that doesn't seem to be loved by great hackers like Harald and Carsten. For example, what is your analysis of the controversies that led Om2008 to ship with Qtopia's predictive keyboard. Let me give everyone a bit more background into the keypad issue. We first saw the Qtopia predictive keypad back in February of 2008, and became extremely exited. This keypad, we believed, had the potential to become better than anything on the market. Yes, it was... We asked Raster to integrate this keypad into Om 2008 and extend it to make it more hacker friendly (i.e., usable from places like the terminal). After two months of more or less silence he showed us his own version, written from scratch. The design was a work in progress. And the dictionary was far inferior to what Qtopia had already. An internal battle started that lasted until one month before Om 2008 was set to be released when our product manager, Will Lai, couldn't take it anymore. He asked another engineer to just get the Qtopia keypad working. Ok, I understand this. But, why have you asked Raster to improve a thing (like qtopia-x11) that should have been only a kind of placeholder? Wasn't it considered in a such way at that time? I always thought that the future of Openmoko was going to reach the Framework, and also if qtopia could be adapted to use it, we all know that its performances under X aren't the ones that we can bear. At that point Raster's keypad was getting stable. It had many new features. But basic text entry was still not as good as Qtopia's. Major parts of Om 2008, in the meantime, were still not finished (like the Glamo or network manager). Openmoko (the company) needs to focus on simplifying. We need to limit ourselves to building what doesn't already exist. We cannot constantly try to build better components from scratch. Our resources are just too limited for that. Openmoko is trying to repackage the essentials (just enough) to make people feel inspired. What's not there is often times more inspiring than what is there. I emailed Raster, the other day, asking if my current perspective corresponds with his. The main motivation for writing a new keypad from scratch, he said, had to do with his ability to (easily) extend Qtopia's code. C++ and qt were not familiar to him. And he wanted something with more configuration options. To get there with Qtopia, he thought, would take more time then writing a new one from scratch. So reading this I only think that what Raster said was not only true about the implementation difficulties, but also about the fact that at that time we needed something that should have survived to Om2008. The keyboard he wrote is actually what the future seems to reserve to us and also if it has some issues with accented words (maybe fixed in svn r38274?!?) and it performs worse with big dictionaries than the Qtopia predictive, I figure that he did the right move. So maybe what happened wasn't in the spirit of the backs to the basics, but he lead us the best input method available today. All I ask is that we please don't continue this debate. We have both now. FSO is using Illume's keypad, so future Om releases will most likely do the same. Sorry for writing again about this... I know that this (the keyboard itself) is not the most important thing here, but I was worried by the fact that we could have lost the farsighted Raster while he was doing something of great and precious for our future. -- Treviño's World - Life and Linux http://www.3v1n0.net/ ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
Sean Moss-Pultz sean at openmoko.com writes: sniplots of stuff Sean Kudos to you for your openness about the status of Openmoko Inc and the future roadmap, the numbers so far and future ambitions.Also for your hints about some of the hard decisions and pain along the way. Its no small achievement to take this start up to the stage where it can look forward to improving existing software stacks based on solid FSO middleware and future product releases given these tough economic times and all in the community will be pleased to hear that this can be the case. Having been part of product dev previously I am very forgiving of the hw and sw bumps in the road that are inevitable - keep up the good work! I will buy another Openmoko phone as soon as the next one is released. Happy new year JW ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
