[robolange]

Openmoko failed for so much more than financial reasons. It's been a while since I've thought of that fiasco, but my memories:

* The leadership was terrible. They had no clue what it took to make a mass market product. They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.

* The hardware was buggy. There was one issue that if you let the battery drain fully, you could not get the phone to recharge it and had to use an external charger. Another issue was that the GPS receiver was accidentally surrounded by metal, so barely functioned. There were all kinds of problems with the radios in the early days. Oh, and that touchscreen -- I guess it was typical of pre-capacative touchscreens, but it was hard to use without a stylus and impossible to hit widgets near the edge of the screen.

* The hardware was massively underpowered (compared to competitors) by the time the Freerunner actually shipped. Weak CPU, little RAM, 2G cellular radio in an era when 3G had become standard, so like 5kbps max data transfer.

*Because of the failure of Openmoko leadership, the community fragmented a hundred ways. This meant that there were a dozen or more "distributions" of an OS for the phone, and none could do more than one or two of the things a typical user wanted in a phone at that time. Then there was finally a big bloated distribution (SHR if memory serves) that packed in enough libraries to make a more or less "usable" device, but doing so maxed out the phone's meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything "smart" with it.

* Once again, in absence of strong UX leadership, the community resorted to dumping X11 apps without modification on the tiny screen. Think impossible to read fonts and dialog boxes that ran off the screen with no scroll capability. The vast majority of devs seemed to only use it by hooking it up to a computer via USB networking and SSHing into it.

As a technical user, I could live with this. Kinda. Sorta. Using it was an exercise in masochism. I was embarassed ... no ... humiliated when a nontechnical person compared their iPhone with the OpenMoko that I had talked up so much (before receiving it).

I had planned to destroy the phone in some fantastic fashion (e.g., melting it with a laser) as soon as I got a real phone. But by the time I could afford an Android, I was so done with it that I just dropped it in the trash (after wiping it, of course).

[heavyset_go]

From the same era, I had Nokia's N770, N810 and N900. All three were based on Linux, and they were great.

I also had the Palm Pre and Pre 2, both of which were based on Linux (and apps were made with HTML, CSS, and JS in 2009!), and those were also great.

[wjertyj]

Not only were the Maemo/Meego devices based on Linux, but they embraced a lot of desktop standards. Telephony/messaging all went through Telepathy, UI was GTK under Maemo, then QT under Meego. The app store was just an apt/dpkg frontend.

[h4waii]

Man I miss those days.

I've still got an N770, N810, 3x N900s and an N950 developer device that I run battery maintenance on every 4 or 5 months.

Had a Pre 2, and still have an HP Veer. Making modifications to the system to customize or change things was so easy and straight forward, I really miss this; though building LineageOS / AOSP for supported devices kinda fills this niche for me now.

[robolange]

After getting rid of my Freerunner, I had one of the the first Android phones (HTC?) briefly, then got a Nokia N900. I liked the OS, although it's my memory that it wasn't as fully open sourced as the OpenMoko. I did enjoy it, even though the device always felt too thick to be comfortable in my pocket, and the touchscreen cracked badly after a minor impact. I ended up using a cheap Nokia candybar phone for a year or so, before eventually getting another Android phone.

I wish Nokia had continued developing the Maemo OS.

[pabs3]

Maemo Leste continues to develop Maemo:

https://maemo-leste.github.io/

[seba_dos1]

> They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.

No, not really. They had an exact opposite problem - they made several iterations of the default operating system, starting almost from scratch at each iteration, which burned quite a lot of energy and willpower of the community, which in turn focused their efforts on alternative distros like SHR or QtMoko.

> had to use an external charger.

Fortunately, you could use a standard Nokia BL-5C battery with the Freerunner. You didn't even need to have an external charger, just a charged spare battery would suffice. Also, IIRC this was an issue only with the first batch (so a small minority of produced phones).

> Another issue was that the GPS receiver was accidentally surrounded by metal, so barely functioned

Not really. The GPS problem was because of microSD clock interference. You could solder a resistor on microSD slot pins or use a software workaround that clocked the reader down enough to not interfere.

> it was hard to use without a stylus

I have programmed quite a lot on that touchscreen with OSK without using a stylus. It worked fine, but yeah, it would be much better if the screen weren't recessed (N900 did that well, that touchscreen was excellent).

> so like 5kbps max data transfer.

More like 100kbps.

> Then there was finally a big bloated distribution (SHR if memory serves) that packed in enough libraries to make a more or less "usable" device, but doing so maxed out the phone's meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything "smart" with it.

Uhm, no? SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro with E17-based window manager. It was one of the snappiest and most reliable distros for that device, I used it for a few years as a power user and was very happy with it. And maxing storage wouldn't be an issue anyway since you could boot from an SD card.

Eventually I've switched to a N900 because of the Freerunner's slowness. If Glamo wasn't so slow I guess I would use it for a few years more before switching. I still have it and it still works, although I don't really use it anymore.

[robolange]

Whoops, good call, that should have been 5kBps. GPRS had something like 85kbps theoretical maximum transfer speed, but the fastest I ever got anything to transfer over cellular was about 5kBps. Still, even in that era, that was absurdly slow, and unusable for anything web-related.

> SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro

I might have been thinking of a different distribution. There was one that brought in all of the GTK, Qtopia, and Enlightenment libraries, so you could run pretty much anything that could compile on the Freerunner, but it was quite slow and consumed most of my SD card (which at the time was probably only something like 1GB).

I guess if you were a hard-core hardware and systems hacker, the OpenMoko was an acceptable platform. For anyone else, it was a terrible product and the company that made it was obviously doomed to fail.

Maybe if it had come out at least 2 years earlier, it might have had some hope of carving out a sustainable niche, but by the time it did come out, the expectations set by iPhone and Android made it impossible to find a product-market fit, even among open source lovers like me. Maemo, while if memory serves not fully open sourced, was far closer to something sustainable, but then Nokia voluntarily imploded :-(

[serf]

>I was so done with it that I just dropped it in the trash (after wiping it, of course).

next time you have an urge to throw a battery-equipped device into the trash(!?), consider donation.

you may not like the device but someone out there may be thrilled at the chance to de-solder some useful components.

[robolange]

Most of the hardware I've ever owned I still have, either in working order or as component boards decorating my walls. I recall my emotion when disposing of the Freerunner was that it didn't deserve an epic funeral (the laser) or even the honor of being properly disassembled.

[ryukafalz]

The problem with throwing any kind of device that includes a lithium-ion battery in the trash is that lithium-ion batteries tend to catch fire when crushed. Like, say, in a trash truck's compactor.

Everyone: please do not do this. Dispose of your battery-powered devices somewhere that's equipped to handle them.

(Now, the Openmoko phones had a removable battery, so it's possible you didn't toss that out with it. Then it's "just" e-waste rather than explody e-waste.)

[cocoa19]

It might also be illegal to throw away lithium batteries in the trash, depending on where you live.

[robotbikes]

Yeah I had one and I donated it to a university computer science department in South America. I'm not sure if the students ever got much use out of it but I was happy to pass it on to someone who might have fun tinkering with it.

[Ma8ee]

Or at least send all electronics for recycling. Those precious metals don’t belong in landfills.

[fsflover]

> They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.

This is exactly how it works with Pinephone now, and it works really well.

[moepstar]

I recall that, even if only with disgust.

I've also had a Freerunner, in theory the ideal pocket computer with Linux on it.

Practically, you could barely have a phone call with all the echo going on and navigation-wise it took _ages_ to find its GPS fix (no AGPS iirc) - the shielded antenna, mentioned down-thread, probably didn't help.

And yeah, whatever you had on screen was probably way too small to be read or interacted with :(

I think i got rid of it on eBay after a few weeks...

[ericlewis]

GPS receiver being surrounded by metal without some sort of antenna just seems like some sort of crazy bad design skill that even software engineers may know is awful… so, how on earth would this thing have ever shipped at all? Weird to call that an accident?