[Herts] Meeting follow-ups

[Ian Gregory]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:34:53PM +0100, Steve Clark wrote:

> It was great to finally get a look at an Asus EEE after reading so 
> much about them. I think we should encourage people to bring in new 
> gadgets,

I missed the meeting because I went to London for a UKUUG free evening 
talk an OpenMoko by Ole Tange which was attended by about 100 people:

http://www.ukuug.org/events/openmoko/ 

Ole had a couple of last year's Neo 1973 phones but there was a 
developer in the audience who had a rare final prototype of the Neo 
Freerunner due out this year.

These phones run Openmoko Linux. The Freerunner will include GPS, two 3D 
accelerometers, Wireless, multi-touch screen etc. Ole presented some 
wild ideas for applications. Need sonar? Run a program that pings out 
through the speaker and measures the lag before the mic hears the echo.  
Want your phone to automatically switch to silent when you are in a 
meeting? It can get that from a calendar application.  What if the 
meeting overruns? Don't turn the ringer on until you move more than 10 m 
from the location you were in during the meeting. What if you put your 
phone somewhere and forget where? Well you can ring it, but what if the 
battery went dead? Have the phone report its position to a server just 
before the battery dies so you can go to it's GPS coordinates.

Apparently there is an active mailing list with people getting excited 
about all the Open Source stuff they will be able to write for it, and 
if it takes off I guess it will be ported to other handsets. Ole said it 
could probably run a Java Virtual Machine to run Google Android apps if 
it ever becomes more than vapour ware.

And I got to see an Asus EEE there as well, I think that is what I would 
buy right now if I wanted a laptop.

Ian

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/