Certainly better than the other version, but hardly something that can hold up to even casual comparisons with the iPhone.

Making great interfaces is really hard work, deceptively so. Hopefully they will greatly improve this product so the iPhone will have some credible competition.

So far, it's a bust.

They won't have much time tho, the iPhone is taking off so fast it might not even matter if they get a great product out if it takes them 6 or 9 or 12 months. By then their only audience will be the very small niche of hard core geek hackers, hardly big enough to pay for continued development and manufacturing.

you're completely missing the point when you compare the OpenMoko's software to the iPhone's at the time. It being shipped at about the same time doesn't mean at all that it's software can be considered finished. Making the OpenMoko ready for everyday use is the community's job. Many developers didn't jump in at the deep end with the Neo 1973, but instead waited for the Freerunner, which shipped just a few days ago. Give it some time, man ;-)

This is an extreme version of a one sided rant. The phone is very much faster than any of my former Nokias when running qtopia, hands down.

Regarding the input methods, if this guy had even spent a couple of seconds to read what they are meant to do (like for instance the built in help), he would see that the first keyboard version is meant to use finger input. It expects you to not be able to hit every key right, so it guesses that what you chose could have been one of the surronding keys, and uses that method as sort of a T9 for any ordinary phone, only more clever since you don't have to flip trough a bunch of words. The keyboard layout and adaptive wordlist works very well. Unfortunately only in english for the time beeing. With a little practise (a touch screen is different from keys after all), this is very efficient, and I write messages faster on this than on my Nokia.
The full keyboard is brilliant if you want to remote connect to another computer or whatever. Very nice when in a terminal (yes, comes with the default build).
The handwriting input method takes some getting used to. If you do not agree with how to type an i or a t (or whatever), you can change the gesture for it yourself. Very easily done in the config, as I did with b and v and a couple of others (my handwriting is horrible, I am impressed that it gets any of it). Very hard to use without a stylus though, if not impossible. The first keyboard is by far the best for regular usage.

You can also of course disable the dictionary to write whatever you like, like you would on an ordinary phone when you disable T9. So the 3 minutes of complaining about it seems quite a waste of time. Should have read some help info instead.

I use the qtopia as my daily phone, and it is not much worse than my nokia. I can call, I can send SMS, and it is only going uphill from here.

I am, by the way, not working for Trolltech or anything related to them.

As for the other video, yes, that is a bit sluggish, but it is really improving quickly, and the ammount of applications you will be able to run on the X11 is near limitless. It should be possible to run pretty much everything on ther, thoug it might be a bit slow:
mail.gna.org/public/wesnoth-bugs/2007-11/msg00361.html
Wesnoth is quite a big thing to have running on a cell-phone, but it works if you are patient =)

Right now, development is being done, and the oss community is for once allowed to take part in that part of the process of making a phone. Give it a few months, and it should be looking quite different from now.

Firstly, Dave - use manual exposure mode on your video camera. It's ridiculous trying to trick the auto-exposure into doing the right thing, when you can set the right exposure instantly yourself.

As for Morgan's comments, where do I start?

"The phone is very much faster than any of my former Nokias when running qtopia, hands down."

That's what's known as "damning with faint praise". I'm not sure why you think this is good. You're basically saying your former Nokias were unacceptably slow. This is still unacceptably slow. Shouldn't you be damning both phones for being so slow? Compare to an iPhone (which this phone has been designed to imitate) - the performance is light years apart.

"The full keyboard is brilliant if you want to remote connect to another computer or whatever."

What, does the keyboard suddenly not suck when you use it as a remote terminal? If so, why couldn't they use that improved keyboard as the normal one, and not just for remote connections?

"I use the qtopia as my daily phone, and it is not much worse than my nokia."

Wow. So, you're saying that this phone is worse than the terrible phones that Nokia makes... and that makes it somehow good?

"Give it a few months, and it should be looking quite different from now."

Why should we believe you? Technology companies and programmers say this kind of thing all the time. It's called "vaporware". I've seen too many of these never-achieved promises to put any trust in them.

Show me the final working product, and then I might believe you.

As for WaasOne:

"you're completely missing the point when you compare the OpenMoko's software to the iPhone's at the time."

But the FSF has released a public statement doing exactly that, and urging consumers to buy one of these instead of an iPhone.

If we're not supposed to compare the products, why is the FSF telling us to do exactly that?

Also, why shouldn't we compare the two phones? We certainly can't compare the iPhone with something that doesn't exist yet. This is the product that OpenMoko is currently offering. Therefore, it is perfectly valid to compare it to another currently shipping product.

Unless, of course, you have access to a time machine, and can bring me back this OpenMoko phone of tomorrow.

It's like somebody trying to sell you a 1950 b&w TV in 2008 for twice the price of a digital set! i love your site, but allow me to add a general comment here not about the video content, but its form. (i will probably sound like a jerk, but since we all think that form is important…)

The videos stink big time! The lighting is awful, the bightness off, the angles not thought over, the speech articulation is bad—almost everything concurs to diminish the power of the demonstration, and it's a witness to the incredible badness of the phones that their mediocrity still "shines" through.

Now, you may say that this is not the point and that it's not done by a professional—but that would be exactly the kind of thinking that gives birth to these open-source monstruosities. Even if you are not a professional video artist, as soon as you put your videos on the web, you enter a market—in the making now— where, ultimately, the selection will be made (by us) as much on the form than on the content. Imagine one second your videos reshot professionally: all your points easily understood without having to squint and guess, the text well spoken, and then imagine being given the choice of watching the poorly-produced or the well-produced clips.

i hope you get somebody to shoot professionally your pieces: they will gain a lot, and the site and you will benefit much from it. For now, the videos end up looking a little like what they rightly mock: little OpenMokoVideo train wrecks. Think iPhone!

About the video, I'm pretty sure he was recording on his MacBook (which explains the iChat log on/log off sounds). But you'll notice he appears to be using the trackpad when he starts and ends the video.

It's interesting that the FSF have taken such an stance on the iPhone. You can unlock the iPhone and have access to what is very definately beautifully designed hardware but with your own choice of software; the OpenMoko is an interesting project but the hardware is not consumer-friendly, which was the point of the video above. It's for niche markets, such as engineering or scientific requirements, and with the FSF's approach it will stay that way, even with the best of intentions.

All of the complaints that the FSF have about the iPhone can be directed just as easily at the majority of the phones available; what interests me is that they are avoiding having a go at the carriers, who are essentially the customer for any mobile device, and who dictate the features on most mobile phones produced today. Even the FSF knows who really runs the show, and they've carefully avoided getting on the wrong side of the people who keep the mobile market tightly locked down. They're not shy of putting ethics to one side in their own interest.

Few people buy an unsubsidised device, and fewer a device that hasn't been cleared to work with a network; and certainly if you use the Openmoko on a network, you can be located and your activities monitored just as easily as with an iPhone and I think it's very disingenuous of them to suggest that their phone is any different. Apple doesn't own any mobile network any more than any other device manufacturer; they just know how to create a more consumer-friendly device. The iPhone will eventually be displaced by something from LG, or Nokia, but because the market will have moved on and they'll have a better fit to the market, not because they'll have a produced a phone that has an outdated physical interface and can only deal with a limited, unpopular range of media formats, but has better software licencing.

+1 to Blain's comment. It's pyrrhic.

Why can't people admit that Apple made a very very incredible technology. And to release a open source phone is interesting becasue Apple has already made a product that would be very difficult to over come. The iPhone can be jailbroken anyways. I think a open source smart phone would be great, but it shouldn't suck.

1) I wonder what the iPhone looked like after it had an equivalent number of programmer hours put into the software... We'll never know... locked behind the walls of Apple.

2) The awful keyboard on the FreeRunner encourages it's target market, *software developers*, to come up with better input methods... let's not forget that we have bluetooth, USB, etc... The iPhone's keyboard is pathetic... just less pathetic than the FreeRunners... you either quote WPM, or you are a moron.

3) I want both phones... one in each pocket (Depending on whether I want to be a producer or a consumer)

Whatever you people say, the OpenMoko so far is broken. I have one and I pretty much hate it, even though I love the linux distros and have _happily_ suffered through a lot of FOSS train wrecks but this one takes the cake. The predictive text was plain imbecile if you write in anything other than basic English. I'm so grateful they got rid of that in SHR; compared to it, the terminal keyboard is fantastic, and yet it is still slower than writing on a normal phone. Everything is horribly slow, there is not ONE application that has worked for me to set up wireless networking -- I do it with a terminal script and ye olde iwconfig/ifconfig/dhclient. Sometimes the qt text controls are unresponsive no matter how much I click on them.
In one year they have become marginally better. But still a whole disaster. Sorry, it's the truth. I wish I hadn't bought it.