Looks like there’s another entry into the Linux based phone arena, GPE Phone Edition. That’s kind a blast from the past. One of the first Linux handhelds I managed to get going was an iPaq that I reflashed with software from handhelds.org, some time around 2001 if I remember correctly. It was fantastic bunch of software and a great device to play around with. But it didn’t have a GSM modem so it ended up being pretty much just a toy, though really useful for demos of home connected devices.
It’s great to see effort being put behind getting this working for phone devices. They’re building on top of standardization effort called LiPS, the Linux Phone Standards Forum. I’m assuming the work is mostly exploratory at this point, as the only published specification is an RFP for the reference platform, and there are no developer resources yet.
What’s really brought about the explosion in Linux for mobile devices seems to be the modularization of a GSM modem that abstracts away the handling of the DSP from the main processor. The TuxPhone folks were the first ones that I had heard from that found a GSM module that fit their needs. Since then there’s been a flurry of activity. The Greenphone has shipped already, OpenMoko is supposed to start shipping Neo1973s during Q1, and there are a bunch of efforts from industry consortia for standards through informal hacker meetups contributing to pushing forward the effort. This should be a very interesting year for mobile Linux.
