Greenphone Official Word
There’s info about the Greenphone and Qtopia Phone Edition up on the Trolltech site now. Interestingly the discussion about the future of the Linux platform seems to have moved over to Vodafone Betavine. Interesting choice, I’m not going to comment.
As a hobbiest interested in open mobile platforms I’m going to have to downgrade the effort from “neutral” to “ignore”. It might be worth checking out at some point, but the effort is off the rails right now. Note that this is the hobbiest view: if you’re just taking time on your own to poke at something cause you’re interested in having one of the devices around and think you could make it do interesting stuff. If you’re looking to manufacture a load of devices and sell them to consumers that’s a whole other issue I’m not going to comment on now.
My current recommendation for the most promising long term project is OpenMoko. It just actually makes sense. There’s a kernel, a toolchain, core services, and I have info about all of them. I still don’t understand what’s in the Greenphone SDK. And my current recommendation for best way to get some instant gratification hackery going quickly is the Maemo platform that runs on the N770 and N800 internet tablets from Nokia. You can walk into Best Buy or CompUSA and get one, get home and be developing within a few hours.
October 24th, 2007 at 1:56 am
Hi,
Our press release was not about moving towards Vodafone betavine, but instead about how we will no longer be selling the Greenphone, and that we now suggest the Neo 1973 for people interested in developing using Qtopia.
Vodafone betavine just happens to be one of the groups that bought the Greenphone and were nice enough to provide a supporting quote for the press release.
October 24th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
This bit in the middle:
“Going forward, Vodafone Betavine hopes to be stimulating the development and growing awareness of the Open Source community by housing their innovative work, and offering open API’s on the portal.”
Within the context of a press release about the Greenphone, but quoting folks from Betavine more frequently than you quote Benoit, certainly makes it sound like the effort is moving over there. I could see how it could be read a different way, but my initial impression was what I said.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:25 am
Yes, in that context I could see how this could have caused confusion. But the important point is that we will continue to support open phones with our software.