
Sun's JavaFX Mobile smartphone, the Neo 1973 (2007) - Apocryphon
https://web.archive.org/web/20090209064119/http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where
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rkapsoro
Whoa, hold up - that's OpenMoko's hardware
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko)),
the Neo1973. It predates Android, and was a serious attempt to use commodity
free software (primarily Linux, GNU, and various GNOME components, I believe)
to do a fully open source smartphone. Bear in mind this was in the latter days
of things like Symbian, Blackberry, and Palm Treo, so it was pretty seriously
ahead of its time. There's been a long line of similar attempts by various
industry actors since.

I have one in my collection somewhere; I even tried to use it a couple of
times as a daily driver, but sadly, the project was just too alpha at the time
for that.

Certainly interesting that Sun was trying to use it (as relatively open
hardware, from a hacker-friendly OSS project, it's was well suited to a
skunkworks like that) for their JavaFX work, but it certainly wasn't their own
"JavaFX Mobile smartphone".

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vips7L
I'm actually a little excited to see where JavaFX goes today. Gluon just
announced substrate [0] which uses Graal to turn JavaFX apps into native
binaries.

[0]
[https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate](https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Presumably that would enable iOS as a target platform, which I presume cannot
be done today on account of the no-JIT rule. I don't imagine it would have
that much impact on desktop though, beyond better startup times and perhaps
reduced memory consumption.

~~~
shemnon42
Not presumably, it does. They are shipping it. Have been shipping it since at
least last year. Ahead of Time compilation is how they get around the no-JIT
rule.

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ptx
Throughout the text (laying out the Java vision), the user is described as a
passive "consumer" who will be "reached", "targeted" and generally have their
experience controlled by advertisers, device manufacturers, content owners and
service operators. With nobody considering the user's perspective, it's no
wonder the Java UX turned out the way it did.

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fit2rule
I truly wish this had gone on to become a viable consumer product - and the
Creative Labs Zii Egg, too. PlaszmaOS, the Linux-based OS which ran the Zii
Egg, was pretty darn efficient for a phone .. and it seemed to me that it came
pretty close to being ready for market. I truly wonder why Creative Labs
abandoned the project - they could have been a market leader in place of
Android.

Some day I'll dig these devices out and have a look at them. Strange to
realise how far we've come, yet what could have been much, much better if only
CL and OpenMoko had the balls to follow through...

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sgt
What's little Jonathan up to these days? I heard he's involved in a health
startup called CareZone, but I've heard very little about it.

