

EFF Kicks Off Campaign to Free Your Phone - lnguyen
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/01/15

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lallysingh
So.. does this mean any promotion to get people to help on the OpenMoko
project? Or are we going to silently pretend that it didn't happen -- like a
mistake that the polite don't mention?

~~~
SingAlong
Just a couple of years back, I really wanted to take a break from my web
development stuff and buy an OpenMoko phone to develop something on it (and I
couldn't afford one of my own). I thought it would really be cool to own one
and mod it, and feel it would be cool even today. I hope they start giving
student discounts or atleast release an SDK that would help develop for
OpenMoko without the actual hardware.

Anyway, the FreeYourPhone campaign has some sense in it. But they could have
instead gone the other way and brought together mobile platform developers and
form a standard so that an app would work on every phone (yeah I know java
does, but not an "everybody supports" standard). Atleast the core can be same.
Something like linux. This way every app developer would be spending less time
developing an app (since there would be much less porting job to be done) and
have a larger reach. This also works for the customers since they would have a
much larger app catalog to buy from.

Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we
would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now.
Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with
your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores. That would open
up a new business opportunity. And very very good for small time app
developers. Piracy is a problem, but maybe making the app a "shame-ware" can
poke the user to pay if he likes it. (ref:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400527>)

I'm just out of words to explain such an exciting and competitive situation,
so I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

~~~
pavlov
As an alternative to OpenMoko, Nokia's Maemo (<http://www.maemo.org>) is also
a fairly standard Linux platform based on GTK+ and Hildon. Nokia also owns Qt
nowadays, so it will be integrated in Maemo eventually.

I rather like Maemo. The first versions that shipped on the N770 and N800
tablets were shaky, but they've made a lot of progress -- IMO it's finally
delivering on the promise of a user-friendly Internet-oriented pocketable UI
on top of Linux. Graphics performance has been a weak point of the platform,
which is a shame considering that the displays on the Nokia tablets have been
very good. But the upcoming version 5 of Maemo will finally enable 3D graphics
acceleration on TI's OMAP3 platform (same CPU+GPU platform as used in the Palm
Pre). Maemo 5 includes the Clutter API for building accelerated UIs.

(Maemo 5 will also include 3G mobile phone connectivity support, so it will
effectively become a phone OS... I wouldn't have bothered to bring it up in
this context otherwise :))

 _> Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then
we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold
now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing
with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores._

Funny -- this is exactly how Java mobile phone games have been sold in my
country (and presumably most of Europe) since about 2003. Purchases are
initiated by SMS and delivered as over-the-air downloads, so starting up a
"mobile game store" is as easy as getting an SMS short number and hooking up
the content delivery system.

Most of these companies also sell other mobile content as well -- ringtones,
background images, clip art for picture messaging, and so on. At least a
couple of years ago, they were doing pretty good business, and the content
stores were running lots of ads in both traditional and online media. (The
newspaper ads were basically filled to the brim with little previews of the
"hottest" graphics, games and songs available; each content item had a code
for ordering by SMS.)

I don't see those ads as much anymore though, so maybe the novelty of mobile
phone content downloads has dried up... Or maybe they're now advertising more
directly to the teenagers who actually buy this stuff. Still, I definitely
prefer this kind of fully open distribution to the "walled garden" approach of
on-device app stores that seems to be all the rage in America now. (Why should
the hardware vendor become the dictator of content distribution? I don't see
the benefits.)

~~~
SingAlong
LOL! just sometime after I posted I got another crazy idea, but by the time
the edit link had disappeared.

K. la, here's it: how abt setting up mobile content booths? Like a phone
booth. You could keep them at the exits of the shopping malls or huge stores
or public places.

These would offer data cables / connection via bluetooth to browse and
download stuff including songs, games, etc. You download, the currency is
deducted from you prepaid balance or added to you bills and you just walk.

Yeah we all know this can be done thru the normal sms-advertise-download-pay
or via an appstore wa etcy instead of physical booths. But when I see a booth,
I also remember I wanna download stuff and do it (something like I used to
remember to send a post to someone after looking at the red mailbox). Going
old fashioned sometimes is cool.

