Sun's JavaFX Mobile smartphone, the Neo 1973 (2007)

Whoa, hold up - that's OpenMoko's hardware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko), the Neo1973. It predates Android, and was a serious attempt to use commodity free software (primarily Linux, GNU, and various GNOME components, I believe) to do a fully open source smartphone. Bear in mind this was in the latter days of things like Symbian, Blackberry, and Palm Treo, so it was pretty seriously ahead of its time. There's been a long line of similar attempts by various industry actors since.

I have one in my collection somewhere; I even tried to use it a couple of times as a daily driver, but sadly, the project was just too alpha at the time for that.

Certainly interesting that Sun was trying to use it (as relatively open hardware, from a hacker-friendly OSS project, it's was well suited to a skunkworks like that) for their JavaFX work, but it certainly wasn't their own "JavaFX Mobile smartphone".

I'm actually a little excited to see where JavaFX goes today. Gluon just announced substrate [0] which uses Graal to turn JavaFX apps into native binaries.

[0] https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate

Throughout the text (laying out the Java vision), the user is described as a passive "consumer" who will be "reached", "targeted" and generally have their experience controlled by advertisers, device manufacturers, content owners and service operators. With nobody considering the user's perspective, it's no wonder the Java UX turned out the way it did.

I truly wish this had gone on to become a viable consumer product - and the Creative Labs Zii Egg, too. PlaszmaOS, the Linux-based OS which ran the Zii Egg, was pretty darn efficient for a phone .. and it seemed to me that it came pretty close to being ready for market. I truly wonder why Creative Labs abandoned the project - they could have been a market leader in place of Android.

Some day I'll dig these devices out and have a look at them. Strange to realise how far we've come, yet what could have been much, much better if only CL and OpenMoko had the balls to follow through...

What's little Jonathan up to these days? I heard he's involved in a health startup called CareZone, but I've heard very little about it.