The intro video is very...interesting. They have this fast paced, upbeat music while they very slowly do things on the phone, like make phone calls. It felt like they thought we should be impressed it can make phone calls.
I had a friend how got a Freerunner, but he returned it after a few weeks because "no matter how awesome it is, I need something that can actually make phone calls". So it certainly didn't work for him on day zero.
Can't second that ;). While my Freerunner was indeed able to do phone calls on day zero, it also turned in hands-free talking automagically without any possibility to turn it off. This was a lot "fun" especially in public places. So maybe we are talking about the definition of "making phone calls" here.
I then flashed a fully featured Debian on it which was able to do everything except making phone calls. I was so excited about that while all my non-techie friends were like "Well, lucky you but now you have a so called Smartphone which isn't even a phone."
Dropped it as a daily driver after two weeks or so to leave it on my desk for a long time until someone on the Freerunner mailing list asked if someone is willing to sell theirs. 20 people offered theirs for free so I couldn't get rid of mine. Gave it to an Open Device Lab then, they still own it but never listed it in their device list.
But somehow I don't regret buying it in the first place.
Yeah, and that's why we shouldn't be impressed that it can make a phone call. That's expected. But on the intro video for a new phone OS they're 'unveiling' I want to see what's new / different about it. I assume it can make calls.
It's an improvement on Openmoko. I remember the first time some freetard tried to show me Openmoko at a trade show, and before he could successfully make a phone call he had to pop up an xterm, run alsamixer, and fix everything. It was hilarious.
I believe Openmoko used GTK+. Maybe Qt was what the project needed all along.
Openmoko used GTK+ in their first two distro iterations, then Qtopia on X11 with E17-based WM, and then went fully EFL.
And since 2008, when I got my Neo Freerunner, I didn't have many issues with phone functionality unless I broke it myself (which I kept doing, as I loved to tinker with that phone) - and I've been using Freerunner for years until I replaced it with N900. The worst issue I experienced that wasn't my fault was that in GTK-based Om2007.2 messaging app slowed down awfully once it got thousands of SMS in its history, with evolution-server hogging the CPU for many seconds on most actions. Didn't happen on next OS iterations.
There was also buzz issue on early devices, but that was easily fixable.
Oh, but you should be impressed. For how long could OpenMoko not make phone calls?
Open-source phone OSs have a habit of neglecting actual phone functionality. So I think it's great that they highlight it.