OpenMoko and why I ordered one

Finally OpenMoko is is available for order. So, I ordered mine yesterday. Still no confirmation e-mail, but let's be hopeful.

On a side note, on-line store yesterday didn't have selection of model (black/gray or white/orange) so I didn't made a pick. Today there is choice, but I somehow hope that mine will be black :-). But, it doesn't really matter...

People who know me shouldn't be surprised that I would buy a phone which real demonstration is answering a phone call from command line (on device which doesn't have a keyboard!) - just look at
this video from 1:15:00 or so and you will know why you really want this device :-)

Here are some of fun stuff which I would like to hack on:

  • record GPS route and on second occasion estimate arrival time (even integrate with calendar with option to send apology sms 5 minutes before time with estimate of your arrival :-)
  • make all kind of confirmations and informations using speech synthesis... I usually listen to podcasts so it would be real nice to have it mute and read you incoming sms
  • sms sorter, initial reason for buying a phone which can run perl
  • blue tooth keyboard - seems like no-brainer, but I don't really know much about blue tooth devices

I have been somewhat busy with other stuff in my life (including writing compressed filesystem using gzip with fuse -- but that is topic for another post), so I just managed to update my svn checkout of openmoko before by main build server started freezing again. Oh, it seems that constant kernel updates won't be enough to create stable development machine...

But, than I looked around and found out that I can have simple (emulated) openmoko environment by just installing qemu-neo1973. I went so far to install it on Toshiba Tecra with touch screen to get a feel for user interface. I can guess that hacking this device will be fun.