OpenMoko: 10 Years After
I was one of the Google Summer of Code "interns" for OpenMoko back in 2008. I was so excited to get the free OpenMoko device and actually implemented gesture recognition and screen orientation for the device part of the GSoC project. Here's a video of it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc</a><p>But let me tell you about the device:<p>1. You couldn't even make a phone call with it. There was a hardware bug that stopped it from making phone calls. It was basically a PDA...<p>2. If the battery ever ran out, you couldn't start the phone anymore. You had to have a spare Nokia phone that you'd use to charge that battery. Thank god they were using Nokia-compatible batteries. The gist was, never ever to let the phone's battery reach 0%.<p>3. The development of any UX components was cumbersome. They always insisted in supporting GTK and another platform which I forgot its name. They were such a small team and yet they were building two projects which essentially were doing the same thing. Why?!<p>Those three were just a few problems. The Freerunner was definitely not a user-friendly phone.