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In my spare time around here, I’ve been working on the Android version of PhoneGap, partly to help make the vision of a write once run anywhere javascript framework happen. However, since I’m also a hardware hacker, I’ve been messing with the Android Internals, and doing other geeky stuff with the device.

It seems that more and more I hear about other Vancouverites running Android phones, which is interesting. It should be noted that the ADP phones will never get 3G in Canada from the big three providers, since they are using a totally different 3G technology, so if you are a person in Vancouver with an Android, you are probably a developer, and you are probably interested in hacking it.

If I’m right, and assuming that there’s at least 10 people who own this device in the entire Vancouver area (including the 4 people at Nitobi, and Tim Bray), I’m wondering if there’d be any interest in yet another meetup, camp or get together, even if it is just a bunch of geeks with laptops and beer, it should be fun.

Any thoughts?

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.