Openmoko Report #1

I got my Freerunner about two months ago and I made a few experiences until today. Now I want to share these experiences.

FDOM

In my last post – Openmoko: Distributionen (it’s in German) – I presented (subjectiv) the positive and negative ascpects of the different available distributions for the Neo.
I want to add FDOM to this list, a distribution which I use on my Freerunner now as my daily phone.
The FDOM-distribution is based on om2008.9, is enhanced with some fixes from the community, has a lot of applications preinstalled and has a good preconfiguration.

pro’s

• phone-basics work (with qtopia-x11)
• PIM-basics work (with qtopia-calendar)
• GPS mapping works (with TangoGPS)
• mp3 playback works (with Pythm)
• power-management works pretty well
• phone awakes from suspend on incoming call/sms

con’s

• battery life of 1-2 days (it’s enough for daily use, but should be more)
• Qtopia version is 4.3, which is very slow

QtExtended

Nokia released a prerelease of Qtopia 4.4, which is now called QtExtended. I tried this release because there was a lot of positive feedback on the mailinglists.
But in my opinion it isn’t that good. One good point was that QtExtended 4.4 it is much more responsive than version 4.3 but the show-stopper was the broken power-management: the phone doesn’t awake from suspend on incoming call or sms and the battery-life is very short if i don’t set it to suspend.

FSO

I tried the FSO-testing-images a few days ago, too. And I saw that they made good progress with the framework. Big praise to mickeyl and his team, you made really good work! The resource-management is very nice. For example it turns on the GPS if you need it and turns it back off if you don’t use it anymore.
The FSO-phone-application “Zhone” is functional and has all the needed features, but I’m looking forward to paroli…

Paroli

In my eyes Paroli is a very interesting project. It’s a phone-application (dialer, sms, contacts), written in python and elf, which uses the FSO-framework. It is going to replace the qtopia-x11 as phone stack when om2008 resp. om2009 and FSO gets merged. Unfortunately I was not able to get paroli up and running on my FSO-testing-image.

Has anyone got any status-report and/or screenshots of paroli? The only news I can get are the code commits: http://code.google.com/p/paroli/updates/list