Will Linux phones stay around this time?
Openmoko failed for so much more than financial reasons. It&#x27;s been a while since I&#x27;ve thought of that fiasco, but my memories:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>*Because of the failure of Openmoko leadership, the community fragmented a hundred ways. This meant that there were a dozen or more &quot;distributions&quot; 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 &quot;usable&quot; device, but doing so maxed out the phone&#x27;s meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything &quot;smart&quot; with it.<p>* 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.<p>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).<p>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).