Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers 143
n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
Initial QC is Motorola's biggest flaw (Score:4, Interesting)
No mention of Linux on their website (Score:2, Interesting)
The phone specs are not at all detailed, they focus too much on design.
Who would want a phone that looks like a rock?
And the whole HelloMoto thing is just weird. Maybe it works for Japan, but not for the rest of the world.
Above stuff has at least kept me away from motorola.
Sony Ericsson does a lot better on the presentation area.
Motorola should promote the tech side of the phone more.
If I'd known about a Linux phone with decent features and specs I'd have bought it.
Motorola drives me nuts (Score:5, Interesting)
If you replace the built in kernel with an unsigned one, it won't run. I swore my ass off when I learned that, although I wasn't surprised.
For anyone who claims there might be some FCC regulations that prevent this sort of experimentation, you won't produce interference accidentally with these phones. The radio interface is not complicated.
(And don't get me started with Verizon crippling the Motorola phones they sell. It's best to buy the phones independently from the service.)
I think the network service providers (Verizon et al.) should be banned from subsidizing phones, and be should be forced to allow the use of any phone compliant with the their networks' standards. There was an explosion in diversity of landline phones, and massive improvements in their capabilities and prices, when AT&T was similarly forced to untie the endpoint hardware from their network service. I want to see the same explosion occur in the wireless market.
Their goal is to lock you in to old rates for a year or two at a time, and thereby avoid the amazing price competition which occurred in wired network phone service. If buying the handsets is decoupled from subscribing to the network, they'll have no reasonable rational for forcing people to sign long-term contracts, and we'll see proper competition again. I'd be happy as hell to see that. I want phones that serve me, rather than the network service provider.
Do any service providers sell these? (Score:3, Interesting)
As soon as I see Cingular with a Linux based phone, I will own^H^H^Hp4wNzz0r it.
Fire the engineers and marketroids. (Score:4, Interesting)
you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.
I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.
My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.
I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.
One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.
Re:not surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's an example of Motorola UI foolishiness:
If you leave a voice mail on my phone, two dialogs come up. The first says that I have a voicemail waiting. The one following it says "You missed a call from this number: ###-###-####" The first dialog has a 'call voicemail' button. If you press that and retrieve your messages, then hang up, the second dialog is still sitting there waiting for your input. Every five minutes *BEEEEP*. This is irritating. It's even more irritating if you want to see who called before bothering with the voice mail. In that situation, you have to manually dial your #, etc.
So here's my question: Do the new trendy phones like the RAZR suffer from this sort of BS, or did they actually do it right? I've seen plenty of ppl with these phones, but I haven't heard any complaints yet. I'm curious if this is because the problems magically went away or if it's because nobody wants to complain about a phone they spent so much money on.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazing things can be done with this phone. IF motorola released a tiny bit of onfo for the one interface they are keeping secret.
They want you to do the java route and hide behind the lie that the mobile phone companies worry about security while Symbian and Microsoft encourage development for their platforms.
Re:not surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a lot of room for improvement in SDKs (Score:2, Interesting)
The other one is shitty dev tools compared to some of the stuff you can do with other platforms. I'm a big fan of GCC and the linux tools, they aren't what's shitty. It's the whole process that ends up kind of shitty. Symbian is designed for phone apps, there is a defined way to cross compile and deploy apps, depending on what your app does you can probably prototype it and have something working pretty fast. In the Linux world, you either start completely from scratch and spend a lot of time building the environment and tool chains or you buy some half-assed product from one of the dozens of companies that do that for you and then once you see how shitty it is and how they really just packaged some free stuff you build your own anyways. I see tons of room for improvement in this space.
The other thing, again, it's not really bad, but Linux gives you a lot of rope, it is not that challenging to hang your self. Symbian and even Mobile Windows are fairly restrictive and provide a well documented set of services. Java is the closest thing on Linux to a highlevel set of standard APIs. Probably out in most real embedded situations just on virtues. That leaves linux with raw devices and programmers eager to make something work. I liken it to the perl philosophy, where the belief that more ways to do things is better; I think it means that a job is more likely to actually get done in reality but if there are 1 or 2 good ways to do something and 10 shitty ways it also increases that odds that the job will not be done in the best way.