I understand it's been a few months away for some time now

July 12, 2009 11:11 PM

Is the Neo Freerunner there yet?

I am considering getting a Neo Freerunner, but I am skeptical as to the usability and robustness of the software available as I will be using it as my main (only) phone and the wording on the openmoko wiki is somewhat guarded.

I would appreciate any input from mefites who have had some hands-on experience with the Freerunner and the various software distributions available.

Things I care about, in order of decreasing importance:

(1) Basic phone use: making calls, viewing call logs and missed call information.
(2) SMS
(3) Support for non-latin character sets (esp. Greek)
(4) Basic productivity apps - note taking, calculator and the like
(5) Sane contact info management, with simple desktop synchronisation
(6) Basic network apps: e-mail, web, ssh
(7) Ability to customise and generally fsck about
(8) Basic GPS use: Finding position, marking locations and trails

Things I don't care much about:

(1) Multimedia
(2) GPS navigation
(3) Handwriting recognition

Thanks for any insight.

posted by Dr Dracator to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

The Wiki doesn't seem particularly guarded to me:

As a GSM phone: some people have been using it to receive and place phone calls and SMS for months, but with currently shipping software the battery life is only one day. As a GPS device: critical bugs have been ironed out and there is nice software to know where you are using OpenStreetMap. As an alarm clock, media player, internet browser, game console, email reader and contacts manager: software is not stable yet.

Fun toy for a hacker maybe, but not a great choice for a full-time phone.
posted by sophist at 11:55 PM on July 12, 2009

Best answer: I have a GTA02A5. It is, as you suggest, not quite there yet: I don't use it as my primary, everyday phone. It is a fun toy for hacking, but as of six months ago (the last time I upgraded to the most recent software release) it wasn't quite where you want it to be. (Which makes me sad, because I really like FIC's / OpenMoko's approach, but…)
posted by hattifattener at 12:06 AM on July 13, 2009

A friend of mine had an OpenMoko dev phone in spring 2008. He was using it as his primary phone, and had written some neat custom software for it, but still complained of several issues. Battery life was a big deal -- he was charging it off his laptop during the day, IIRC. This guy's a hardcore early adopter/hardware hacker, so I suspect he's more tolerant/forgiving of foibles than your average user, too.
posted by Alterscape at 12:54 AM on July 13, 2009

I think the recent smartphones have taken a bit of wind out of openmoko's sails. For all your criteria above, except maybe "fscking around", I think you would be content with Android. If you use latin most of the time, it may be a trick to switch to greek, but I don't know much about that. I know they are selling phones in Greece, Japan, and Taiwan, so other charsets are no problem in general.

It's a pretty nice environment.
posted by cmiller at 4:51 AM on July 13, 2009

Best answer: At my office, one of my coworkers has used the Freerunner as his daily phone on and off over the past several months. He even got most of the features working nicely—GPS, accelerometer, etc. I have used mine occasionally, too, for non-phone things (playing podcasts and videos). I think you can use it as your daily phone if the following are true:

• You are comfortable mucking around in a Unix environment (SSHing into your phone and using nano or vi to edit text configuration files, etc.)
• You are willing to invest the time into making it work the way you want.
• You're willing to accept more quirks than usual from your phone.
• Once you get it working, you resist the temptation to muck with it, or else you accept the fact that mucking with it might make it unusable as your daily phone again. At least, when my coworker stops using it as his daily phone, this is why.

If you decide to go for this, I highly recommend starting off with the SHR distribution as your base. That seems to be the easiest way to go from receiving the hardware to having a daily phone. I'm not sure if the latest images are 100% ready out of the box yet, but when I last installed it information about what steps you needed to take to flesh things out were reasonably well-documented.
posted by brett at 8:40 AM on July 13, 2009 [1 favorite]