On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 05:44:57PM -0400, Steve Brown wrote: >> Business reality? *looks over at OpenMoko* Although it isn't mine to worry >> about, some companies (smaller ones than nokia, even) seem to be doing fine >> in this business reality. What's better, OpenMoko seem to be delivering open >> handhelds and not excuses (or semi-open handhelds). I'm not going to draw >> out a roadmap of what Nokia should do to conquer the open source handheld >> market, because frankly, there is a lot that we aren't told about Nokia's >> business (and I love how some people on here are pretending that they have >> all of these details about it). But, on one side I have Nokia saying it is >> almost impossible, and then OpenMoko simply DOING it. So, the real business >> reality is that it IS possible, and Nokia isn't doing it for other reasons. >> All of which is totally fine, I'll go for the open one, not the closed one >> that says "well, atleast we tried". > > OpenMoko is not a business, it's a non-profit research organization. > The new phone, when it finally will cost $400 for a tri-band GSM > phone, bluetooth, and GPS. It will have no EDGE support; no 3G > support. Basic PDA functionality will be included out of the box, but > not much else. > > Compared to what you can get, even ignoring the carrier subsidies, > that's a pretty anemic feature set. Sure, open source developers will > buy the phone, but do you really think OpenMoko will be a commercial > success given its price and feature set? > > Obviously, commercial success is not the point of the OpenMoko > project. But to attack Nokia because they aren't following in > OpenMoko's footsteps is also missing the point. > > - Ted To be fair to Nokia, Openmoko just isn't in the same league. The reason that I have a Nokia tablet is because Openmoko's device is all but vaporware. While they're struggling to release a device that was promised a year ago, Nokia is already in the third generation of a real, functional device. While I think that a couple of things in the N810 are steps backward from the N800, at least anybody who wants one can actually get their hands on it. The hardware on the Neo, or Freerunner, or whatever they're going to call the next "release", really isn't any more open than the tablets, either. It's in the same boat of closed GSM, graphics and GPS chipsets and drivers, etc. Mark _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
