[Lancaster] OpenMoko F(r)U(stratio)N

[Dave Smith]

Wayne Ward wrote:
> how you doing anyway dave was the holiday good.

Great fun cheers - just wish I'd had a few days longer and taken more 
pictures. Ah well, next time!

> How you finding the openmoko

It's... interesting.

Yeh. Interesting... :)

The sad truth is that, so far, I've really not played with it all that 
much. I was ill the first few days after it arrived and was in no mood 
to bash my head against it so I didn't try.

Then I needed to backup my SIM card contacts before risking having the 
OM lose them all (Note: It didn't. It didn't like some of the formatting 
for the longer names but, fundamentally, it got all my contacts off the 
SIM no problem).

Then I finally plucked up the courage to stick the card in the OM and 
give it a run for it's money... :)

As to the system itself, all models at present ship with the original OM 
Disto release of 2007.8 (I think...), so it's a little bit out of date 
but fundamentally seems to work at a very very basic level. I believe 
the key principle when releasing that first model was that it should 
show the features the phone can be capable of in time and generally 
dress it up all nice - it achieves that goal. The bootup graphics are 
very nicely polished (better than the latest version, IMO) and the 
interface showed plenty of promise, if little scalability.

Having had a read around and asked a few people who I knew already I had 
one, I flashed that version up to 2008.9 (so the latest OM Kernel 
version) and then went straight ahead into install "Fat and Dirty 
OpenMoko" (FDOM - http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FDOM) again, based on 
recommendations.
FDOM doesn't lie. It is fat, and it is dirty. To put it simply, it seems 
at present that FDOM is the 'official' OpenMoko distro (hence why it 
uses the same kernel) pre-packaged with a variety of the available 
software for the platform in order to be feature-rich and -capable for 
the end user. As such it has a couple of the most popular Wifi managers 
on there; a combination (it seems) of the settings managers; 2 web 
browsers (1 Mozilla-based, and Dillo); TangoGPS to prove the GPS module 
works; a bunch of games (including DukeNukem); some little gimmicky apps 
to show the motion sensor capabilities off; a VOIP phone interface 
(LinPhone); a limited night-sky viewer (think Celestia, but small); 
music and video players; flash player, pdf reader, and image viewer; 
and, of course, the dialer and SMS Messaging stuff. To say it's busy 
would be a huge understatement.

And, to be honest, there is simply too much stuff in there for it to be 
usable (IMHO) as it is. But I think that was the point. It provides an 
alternative for those people (like me) who really don't know which apps 
to try first when starting nearly from scratch with the vanilla OpenMoko 
distribution.
Of course, some things don't work correctly / brilliantly / at all 
(mainly games, it seems). Some things run slowly (it's pretty much 
rammed full of applications, so that's understandable) and other things 
are still being massively worked on, but it gives a good idea as to what 
the unit is ultimately capable of. And it's impressive.

Interface-wise, I actually quite like a lot of its features. It's very 
easy to change from app-to-app whilst leaving the previous one open and 
easily accessible should you want to flip back to it.
The QWERTY keyboard option is really very usable provided you use a 
stylus (provided in the box) and, for the other keypad options the 
spacing is generally good enough that it can also get by using just 
fingertips.

The sensitivity of the touch screen can be adjusted in the settings 
(again, I'm not sure yet if this is due to one of the many applications 
FDOM includes) which is a pretty handy feature.

Battery life. Well, it's not great, but then I went into getting the 
phone expecting as much. It's also very relative. Of course, if you've 
got the GPS constantly trying to lock, the Wifi connected, and you're 
making lots and lots of calls, then it will die quickly. On minimal use 
(except application playing - I call it 'testing'... ;) ) I've managed 
just about a day on it so far, although my suspicion is that when I calm 
down from wanting to try something else every 5 minutes that will get a 
litle bit better. Battery life in general is something the developers 
seem very keen to be working on, so I suspect this will be a prominent 
feature for future patches.
The charge rate isn't bad at all, easily comparable to other phones out 
there (a couple of hours maybe from nearly empty) and is able to be 
charged either from a wall socket or via USB (it uses the 'standard' 
slim USB connector, a la PS3 and I suspect a few other modern phones - I 
know my Motorola used to use the same).
As for the batteries themselves - they use the same format as many 
common Nokia batteries - so replacements are easy to come by!

Most importantly - it's use as a phone. Again, having only used it 
today, I haven't had chance to test it properly. The limited phone calls 
I've had have been blighted by reception problems at both ends related 
to signal, so it's not really a fair test - if the GSM modules are to be 
believed, then it detects signal strength just as well as my previous 
phones, and I've had no problems at all sending and receiving SMS' - I'm 
optimistic, shall we say!

And, I think, that just about covers it so far. I have yet to really 
play with it on a network and therefore test out it's package-management 
capabilities, but hopefully I'll try that soon!
Apologies that this is rushed in parts - it was intended to be a quick 
update as to how I've found it so far, but I realize it comes across 
more as me reiterating what it can do and not a lot about what it 
actually does - I'll try and beat it around a bit more the next few days 
and, of course, I'll bring it down to the Brit next week.

Best,

Dave