Blogs

I’m really glad that Google Open Sourced their Android Stack. It was the right thing to do, and it now makes the Neo1973 relevant again. For those of you who rememer, the Neo1973 and the FreeRunner is a “Free Phone”, which runs Free Software and runs either a GTK or a QT based interface. It was a buggy phone that lacked the features that the iPhone had, not because of the hardware, but because of the software. The thing included a Guitar Pick and generally was a hacker’s phone.

However, early on there were some issues getting Android to run on it. However, now that we have the code, it’s just a matter of compiling it for the right processor. This means that the Neo1973 may not be a useless piece of junk after all and may still have some sort of a use.

The other thing that is cool is that people can create interesting new tools with the iPhone that required low-level access to the hardware, and people can study the phone and the source for vulnerabilities, and other cool things. Releasing the source makes things far more hackable, and the more hackable the device is, the more likely I’ll get one. I still subscribe to the philosophy that if you can’t take it apart, you don’t really own it.

Update: The status can be found here: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Android#Current_State. This may be the way to go once it’s going.