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by robolange 1868 days ago
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 :-(