Finally A Truly Hackable Mobile Phone
While getting my daily dose of technology news and views, I came across this LinuxDevices.com about FIC releasing a Linux-powered mobile smartphone meant for hacking. FIC is one of those big OEMs based in Taiwan. While other manufacturers like Motorola, Nokia and LG are also building Linux smartphones, these are usually very costly and have locked configurations.
One of the world’s largest computer and consumer electronics manufacturers will ship a completely open, Linux-based, GPS-equipped, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone direct, worldwide, for $350 or less, in Q1, 2007. First International Computing’s (FIC’s) “Neo1973″ or FIC-GTA001, is the first phone based on the open-source “OpenMoKo” platform.
Not only does it come with a lot of bells and whistles. It is also cheap at $350 bucks with GSM and GPS. It looks like a good platform to build mobile applications on. Since it has a fully customizable Linux environment, it should be easy to add new bleeding edge features outside the usual Java sandbox of other mobile phones. Finally, it even looks good! I am pretty excited to see if stocks are really made available by January.
February 9th, 2007 at 12:53 am
[…] For those of you who are not familiar with Funambol, this is the company that had a solution formerly known as sync4j (of course, now it is called funambol). They have gone beyond synchronization and generalized their product into a full mobility solution. OpenMoko, on the other hand, is the open source stack that runs on the hackable FIC linux phones I talked about a while back. It would be interesting to see if they can really demonstrate a usable product. Should RIM be worried? Well maybe not yet as Funambol does not have the latest and the greatest released to the community side of their project … yet. […]