Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

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.

Engadget Mobile reports that Trolltech has sold their last Greenphone and is recommending OpenMoko hardware if you want to try out their software. I don’t see anything about this on the Trolltech site however. Last time I spoke to the folks at Trolltech they were talking about further iterations to the hardware and really refining what they were working on. Still, consolidating under the OpenMoko hardware platform feels somewhat like “standardizing on a platform”, so I’m not going to bitch too much.

I ran into someone at one of the MoMo events (at Trolltech interestingly enough) who had a hacked up version of Qtopia phone edition running on some commercial hardware. I think it might have been the Netgear Skype handset. Sure would be cool if they would release info about how to get something like that going. Ultimately the Greenphone didn’t match up with what I would like to see, with a few of the core components being closed. Maybe Motorola will release a Qtopia handset that helps out us open source developers (I’m not holding my breath for that, I hear Motorola mentioned at the same time as Linux on a daily basis but I’ve yet to figure out what the hell it is they’re working on). But it would be nice to see Trolltech giving their existing developers an easy way forward rather then dropping them off to some other project to fend for themselves.

Getting command line access to the Greenphone is pretty trivial through the development environment. However there doesn’t seem to be a terminal application for the phone. While I would definitely like to make one I may not have the time to for a while. So I hacked up one of the samples from the Qtopia source to just take a command to run from a text box and write the output back to the textbox. It’s a hack of the textviewer app, and shows up as textviewer in the app launcher still. Source code is here.