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OpenMoko Neo Freerunner - Part 1
Openmoko, born as a Free Software project under GPL and LGPL license, is dedicated to delivering an open software stack on mobile platforms. Openmoko shipped its first product, the Neo 1973, on July 9 2007; and then turned into a start-up company with one aim: create great mobile products using the Openmoko stack: Open. Mobile. Free.
The first Openmoko product, the Neo 1973, sold exclusively through Openmoko Online Shop. It sold out in early February 2008.
Openmoko started selling the Neo FreeRunner (GTA02), the second generation of Neo, on July 3, 2008. It is available through the Openmoko Online Shop or national distributers.
I received my FreeRunner as part of the first batch of orders shipped on July 7th. I've now been playing with it for 10 days and these are my impressions.
First, a caveat. The first model phone was sold only as a development model. People were told flat out that it was in heavy development and not for every day usage. The second model, the FreeRunner, was going to be the model for general release. As things dragged on and the hardware was finalized, they realized that while the hardware was done, the software was still beta. Because it had already been delayed over a year, the decision was made to release it anyway with the warning that the software was close, but not finalized. Glitches are to be expected, but development is progressing rapidly and for basic functions the phone is good enough. I knew that going in.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Neo phones, the idea was to make a truely open phone "from iron to eyeballs". All the software is GPL or LGPL; the CAD files are available under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license; specs for the chips are available online. Hell, for an extra $99 you can get a debug board with JTAG, serial and phone access via USB. Full hardware specs are online.
The only "non-free" issues are the GPU and GSM chipset.
The GPU is an Smedia Glamo 3362. Originally when this chipset was chosen there was a tacit agreement with Smedia and OpenMoko to get full specs available. Well, something fell thru and Smedia backed out. No real specs and no real hope of getting them. However, never tell a dedicated geek they can't figure something out. Work is being done by people to reverse engineer the API, and discussions are ongoing about whether or not to replace the chip in future revisions of the phone with something properly documented.
The GSM chipset is the Calypso by Texas Instruments. Full documentation is only available thru a tight NDA. However, back in March persons unknown leaked the full specs over to Cryptome. Links to the specs are on the OpenMoko site with a warning about the possible legality of development if you read them. It is also possible that GSM hardware can never be legally open.
Now, on to the review!
The OpenMoko wiki has pictures galore, so I'm not going to be posting any here. Their photography is better than I can do and it is 100% accurate.
First off the phones are sold without SIM cards. They use GSM networks, so that means AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S., or one of their regional partners like Centennial. I've been using an AT&T Wireless pre-paid SIM and it worked without a hitch. There have been some sporadic reports of SIMs that don't work. I'm not familiar with the details because the five I've tried -- all AT&T, some prepaid and some contract -- worked fine.
There are three main distributions for the Neo phones: the 2007.x series from OpenMoko; the ASU series from OpenMoko; and QTopia Phone Edition from Troll Tech.
The 2007.x series (2007.2 shipped on the phone) was the first development platform. It is really Gnome Mobile and based on X/GTK+. While it shows promise, it is fairly far behind the race in development. IMHO it looks like Gnome 2.22 squeezed down to mobile size and it doesn't quite fit.
The benefits are that pretty much any Gnome/X/GTK+ program can simply be cross compiled and it works on the Neo. One excellent example is TangoGPS.
The drawbacks are it is really not that stable and is slow as molasses. To be fair it is development code and a fair amount of debugging code is still in there. It also hasn't had any real optimization, yet.
However, it is reinventing the wheel, and the devs know it. The Gnome Mobile version is being depreciated for ASU. More on that in a minute.
The third version in Trolltech's (now a division of Nokia) QTopia Phone Edition. This is a phone-targetted version of QT that writes directly to the framebuffer and doesn't use X-Windows. It is also a fully mature product, used in dozens of devices. All the heavy lifting is already done: GSM, GPS, Dialer, Messages, E-Mail, Contacts, Media Player, Calendar, etc.
If you want a phone equivalent to what you would get from one of the big boys, then install the QTopia image. It does almost everything by itself, and does it well. It is also fast and designed from the ground up for phones and small-screen devices and it shows. Power management and memory requirements are good.
By "almost" I mean it doesn't come with a built-in web browser or GPS/mapping application. The only bugs I've bumped into is that it doesn't seem to like my home WiFi network (WPA2-PSK/AES) and occasionaly media player will play a song at 3x speed. The first time I encountered this it made Black Sabbath's Iron Man sound like it was being performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks. It was...disturbing.
Other than that, it is rock solid and easy to use. The main drawback is no X-Windows. Programs have to be modified to use QT/Framebuffer to run. KDE developers will feel almost right at home.
QTopia isn't officially part of OpenMoko. It is developed and maintained exclusively by Trolltech. Yes, it is GPL so feel free to do your own thing, but development of the core is pretty firmly controlled by Trolltech (Nokia).
Their model is different. QPE (QTopia Phone Edition) isn't designed to be shipped as it. It is sold to customers who use it as a base, customize the hell out of it THEN ship it on their phone. Sort of like Debian vs Ubuntu.
That is why there is no included GPS/Mapping program or web browser. Usually the phone handset makers have licensed something like Opera Mobile.
Now, back to ASU. That stands for "April Software Update" and is an admission that Gnome Moble isn't the best way to go. Why reinvent the wheel when the GPL/LGPL licenses allow you to take from the best of both worlds?
The ASU takes QTopia on X11 and adds GTK+ and Elightenment and ties it all loosely together with DBus. Unfortunately there is no integration between the elements. If you want to integrate with the phone components, you're back to C++/Python and QT, not C on GTK+.
If that isn't enough, the FSO Stack, also known as the Openmoko Framework initiative. This one is called FSO, because it’s an implementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs.
FSO has been started to overcome the deficiencies both of the 2007.2 and the ASU stack, namely to come up with an extensible framework that gives developers the infrastructure they need to create solid and exciting software products based on the Openmoko platform. An infrastructure that supports competing UIs while we can collaborate on developing services, making the framework strong . Here, the focus is on stable highlevel services that you can access from whatever language or UI that supports dbus.
Of course there is always whispers of Google's Android coming to the FreeRunner.
If all that confuses you and makes you think "just shipped and already distribution wars have started", you're not alone. IMHO, the version that ships on the phone, 2007.2, is already pretty much abandoned. The main devs are working on ASU and FSO, neither of which is stable enough for reliable, every day use.
The good news is you can install two distros on the phone -- on in ROM and the other on a microSD card -- then multiboot. I currently have QTopia and ASU. The bad news is booting the Freerunner takes just slightly over 2 minutes from off to useable.
There are two different hardware models. One is for the U.S. and supporting 850/1800/1900 MHz and one for Europe supporting 900/1800/1900 MHz. Yes, the chipset is the same, but due to some design decisions (flaws?) it can only be used as a tri-band even though hardware supports quad. Maybe this will be changed in the future, maybe not. I got the impression it is a sore subject on some of the lists.
You can purcahse the New FreeRunner from their online store or regional distributors in the U.S., Canada, Germany, India, Poland, the U.K., France or the Czech Republic. Cost is U.S. $399 with discounts for multipacks. I paid $375 including shipping as a member of a buying group for one of a 10-pack.
The reports are sales have far exceeded expectations, as a couple of Universities purchased large bundles for use as development and educational tools. When the online store opened on July 3rd it sold out of everything in stock by July 4th. More batches have arrived and distributors have phones.
I passed the phone around my office, as new phones seem to be popular and everyone wants to see what everyone else has. Currently people have a mix of Treo's, Blackberries, Windows Mobile PDAs and one or two iPhones. The general consensus on the hardware and appearance was "very nice". Several people complimented it on the shape, screen appearance (very sharp) and heft.
On 2007.2 the opinion was uniformly along the lines of "is this really usable?" and "are you insane?". "Dog slow" was mentioned, as well as "what do these icons mean?". Gnome Mobile's choice of icons aren't what I would always call intuitive.
It was the exact opposite with QTopia. "Nice", "snappy" and "lots of features" were said. Many people -- except the iPhone guys -- like the look. However, even the iPhone guys were impressed when I connected to the WiFi link in the office and used the VNC applet to remote to their desktop.
I haven't had a chance to fully test the e-mail, calendar, tasks and syncing. I'm planning on doing that this coming week and posting an update in Part 2 next weekend.
All said and done I really like the phone. And, like the main devs, am hesitant to call it a "phone". It is really a handheld Linux computer that happens to have GPS and a GSM phone built-in. After all, the first thing I did when getting the phone back home was plug it in via USB to my PC, SSH in and run "opkg update && opkg upgrade" to make sure it was up to date. :-)