The Death of the Greenphone

phobos13013 writes "Trolltech announced this week that they will discontinue development on their Greenphone platform. The Greenphone was advertised to be the first phone with a user-modifiable environment. Trolltech CTO Benoit Schilling stated that they are not really a hardware company and so will focus their efforts on FIC's Neo 1973, now available. However, Schilling hinted at a future Wi-Fi-enabled endeavor (possibly a VOIP phone)."

Odd

[Kingrames]

It would appear that they'e sold out of phones.

And yet they're quitting development?

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

They'll be back, I think, with something else. There's plenty of reasons for a corporate entity to want to provide customized phones to its employees, or to give them out as a promotion, or stuff like that.

It's too cool a gadget idea to throw away.

Geek-friendly

[cynicsreport]

It is a common misconception that these phones can't be economically feasible because only a small number of 'geeks' will use them. Yes, I would like a 'geek-friendly' phone, but more importantly, I want a 'developer-friendly' phone. One with a nice API to access bluetooth and wifi capabilities.
When that happens, the general non-geek population benefits due to the availability of quality software that will run on the phone.

So, step 1: make the phone easy to use
Step 2: make the phone customizable
Step 3: make the phone developer-friendly
Step 4: let me use the same API for different phones; I'm sick of recoding half of my program to make it compatible with a different phone!

$700 for a phone? Screw that.

[Vellmont]

I thought apples iPhone was insane at $500, and this thing is/was $200 more than that? No wonder it was a failure.

The $300 neo 1973 replacement is still a bit steep for me, but at least it's in the ballpark.

Re:Unfortunately, you're right

[pherthyl]

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did.

The Greenphone didn't fail, because it was never meant to be anything but a development platform to fill the void while there was nothing else good out there. Now that there are other open phones, its job is done. Aside from the sensationalized headline, this really isn't news at all.

In the Year 2000

[KrackHouse]

Assuming we all had Neos with mobile broadband access and TrixBoxes(Asterisk) running at home what would the future look like? Open Source VOIP? Would we have something like email addresses instead of phone numbers? FYI, my biggest IT coup was installing asterisk at work and having it email everybody voice messages as email attachments. Best bang for your buck if you're about to ask for a raise.

Re:$700 for a phone? Screw that.

[pherthyl]

Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight

I think you still don't understand. Developer platform doesn't mean "phone marketed towards the developer/geek market" it means "device that developers use to test their software on". It's really only that, and the lack of EDGE is not really an issue (unless the network speed is crucial to your testing).

Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux

Trolltech is hugely supportive of Linux (sponsoring developers to work on X, KDE, and freedesktop.org projects like harfbuzz), and the Greenphone wasn't a failure so finding a scapegoat isn't necessary.

Re:$700 for a phone? Screw that.

[FireFury03]

it only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data.

Errm, I might.

I mean, of course I want UMTS, but at the moment there are no open platforms that support it - the Neo1973 is GPRS and GSM only and I'm seriously considering getting one. To be blunt, I'm sick of crappy closed devices that aren't developer friendly (and in the case of my Symbian UIQ phone and VxWorks phone, totally unstable even when you're using them for what they were _designed_ to do).

To me, having a decent speed connection is secondary to actually being able to do useful stuff on the phone, which the current closed platforms do not let me do.

Re:Unfortunately, you're right

[Simon Brooke]

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.

1. If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
2. OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 [openmoko.com] isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
3. When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete [oreilly.com] and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.

I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones [apple.com]you can't even load your own software on.

You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.

Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source [opensource.org]. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls [troll.no] are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. [zdnet.co.uk] So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange [openmoko.com].

Re:Bummer

[torpor]

I also have a neo1973, and am thoroughly enjoying the geek factor - just this week I got it an Apple wireless keyboard for it, set up and running, and I have to tell you all that there is nothing quite so fun as sitting somewhere, hacking code on my phone, using the phone itself. Python+neo1973+apple bt keyboard == the coolest godamn bit of hardware in the room, and I've got tons of stuff in here .. from BeBox to SGI to Access Music to .. well, lots of stuff.

And yes, there is hardware in front of me that had a *lot* of potential. The BeBox, for example. The BeBox and the NEO1973 have a fairly decent set of common traits; both started out as exciting hardware platforms from excited engineers who "thought of all the potential, but never implemented any of it" ..

The difference with the neo1973 and openmoko in general is that the BeBox lesson has been learned, and learned well .. OpenMoko will move onto whatever hardware it can support, and it will move rapidly. Its already being planned for a number of other devices in the near future - not just phones, but such things as synthesizers, musical gear, etc. In that capacity, it looks to fair pretty well .. all the tools are there in the base OS to give developers a real boot in the ass and make something nice for their end user.

But the thing to keep in mind in all of this is: the *hardware* *has* *to* *be* *there* *first*. OpenMoko is just a software platform. If it gains traction, watch as numerous other hardware vendors come along, take the risks, and reap all the rewards of not having to bootstrap a software environment for their users from scratch ..