OpenMoko Neo1973 Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home List of Figures Quickstart The Neo1973 OpenMoko Interface Today Dialer Contacts Messages Tasks Calendar Feed Reader Web Browser Maps Audio and Video Games Networking Terminal Other Applications Applications Manager X Terminal OS and Hardware Connecting With The Neo Application Development Index

Preface

Open standards and open source are fundamental planks in ensuring our ongoing freedoms and our ability to share what we know with our friends and society so that we can better innovate and benefit everyone--and be society friendly.

Mobile telephones and smartphones, deploying closed standards with locked plans, provide a demonstration of how commercial interests can often result in our freedoms being eroded. Apple's iPhone is an interesting example of how people can be locked into a scheme that ensures ongoing and easy profits for the manufacturer. Not only do you pay $600 for an iPhone, but you are also locked in to a two year mobile phone plan with a single provider, with no choice at all, and a minimum additional spend of something like $1500.

The Neo1973 brings to the community a new philosophy where the manufacturer, OpenMoko of Taiwan, an offshoot of First International Computer, delivers an open standards portable device (otherwise known as a smartphone and personal digital assistant) that you actually own and control. The motto is ``if you can't open the device then you don't own it.'' The device is based on hardware for which there are open source drivers available, and is built on the open source GNU/Linux operating system. Anyone is allowed to write applications, and through a collaborative community, sharing the source code with each other, we can expect to see some really innovative applications emerge for the Neo1973. The smartphone has been freed.

The Neo1973 smartphone uses the OpenMoko distribution of Gnu/Linux as its open software development environment to provide the foundation for these developments.

To be successful though, the Neo needs to minimally be just an easy to use mobile phone supporting dialling, messaging, contacts, and a calendar. It needs to work straight out of the box with an appropriate SIM and allow the general user to make calls. The Neo will provide a lot more though, and these additional applications will be what makes people transition to this open device--we will see new killer applications emerge.

In this book we provide a guide to using the Neo, and the applications based on the OpenMoko framework. We also cover the software development environments for the Neo, in the hope that others will be able to easily contribute to the growing catalogue of useful tools.

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