| > 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. |
> 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 :-(