Greenphone. Gimme gimme gimme gimme.
I went to the Homebrew Mobile Phone club meeting last night (I would put a pointer up, but their site seems to be down, which has already resulted in more email than I can handle right now… but trust me, there is a group, it does still exist, and I was there last night). One of the presentations was from Benoit Schillings from TrollTech talking about the Greenphone, a phone built using the Linux operating system and the Qtopia application platform. In a few previous lives I did a lot of Linux embedded systems kernel hackery, so I’ve been drooling over the chance to get my sweaty mitts on one of these things to play with.
Looks like they should be shipping soon, and Trolltech is taking orders from developers, open to the public. Just pay the $700 dollars and you get your phone. $700 for an open source phone!! Apparently people are complaining about the price. Insane. It costs a lot to make some phone hardware that actually works and get it running Linux. This is rev 1, of course it costs. I’ll happily pay the money to get me a real honest to goodness open phone. Still waiting for someone from Trolltech to get back to me so I can put my order through. I was going to try to mug Benoit in the parking lot. But he looked pretty spry and energetic, so I decided to just purchase one instead.
So how open is the open phone? You get the source code to everything. Every little bit. Kernel included, and you can download your own to play around with using the included SDK setup. EVERYTHING! I got dizzy when he said that, it’s too good to be true. So of course I need to check it out.
