Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether this has an open-source* baseband/firmware, and open-source graphics drivers. If not, it's not better than, say, a Nexus 4, which you can unlock and put custom software on it (e.g. Ubuntu Phone, I'm sure you could port Meego/Maemo/whatever it's called nowadays). The Nexus of course has vastly superior hardware.

If I buy such a tinkerphone as this, I want to be able to play with it at all levels. For example: Imagine the mobile connection doesn't work, but it still displays the GSM network's name? So it still transmits some data.... I want to be able to see where it hangs. E.g. do my packets reach the other station? Do I get garbled responses, or no responses at all? ... I want to be able to access the audio stream programmatically, which is not possible on 99% of android phones. And so on.

Mobile technology is such a black box, due to closed firmware. I wonder what amazing things will be possible if people can hack their phones' radios.

(* With focus on "I can compile and modify everything myself", don't care too much about license politics.)

It uses an OEM modem module (non-free) and PowerVR graphics (non-free). At the moment there is just no really viable open-source baseband/graphics hardware available (though people are working on both).

However, building working, commercially available phone platforms is an important step towards completely open mobile phones.

Compared to an unlocked Nexus 4, Neo900 has a few crucial advantages:

* most drivers are in the mainline Linux kernel, making it easy to upgrade the kernel. * the hardware will be completely documented, allowing me to add or modify sensors for research projects * there are two supported non-Android OSes with working kernels, existing communities and developers. * it has a physical keyboard

(of course, there are a lot of obvious disadvantages, too)

"It uses an OEM modem module (non-free)"

Well that's too bad, because as captainmuon hints at, above, that is the only thing that matters. The. Only. Thing.

A free/open baseband processor changes everything and makes possible a world of control and new features that most phone users have no inkling of.

At the very, very least they could choose a baseband processor that already has some cracks in it and then perhaps blow it wide open once there is wide adoption of these neo900 devices ... sort of establish this baseband as a "new calypso" ... but there is no mention of that.

Hey neo900 folks - can you post somewhere obscure (if you're trying not to spook your bb-proc suppliers) like osmocom dev list and give us some hints as to what you hope to do here ?

It has a keyboard. That makes it infinitely more interesting to me than a Nexus 4. I bet a lot of (former) N900 users will agree. While I never used an N900, I've used phones with and without keyboards over the past few years, and I'm not settling for a touch-only device.

There's also more and more of the base Android apps that are abandoned in favour of closed-source, Google branded apps. So there's that as well.

I would have agreed before Swype/FlexT9/etc existed. Now I find I can type faster on gesture-based keyboards than I ever could on the hardware keyboards anyway.

Yes, but it's a 3 row keyboard. I upgraded from the G1 (5 row qwerty) to the G2 (4 row, numbers-on-the-qwerty-row) and it's next to useless.

As a phone, I need to use the number line a lot. As a computer /terminal, I need to use letters, numbers & symbols a lot. 3 and 4 row keyboards are bad for both of these use cases.

If someone makes a decent, interesting 5-row qwerty phone, I will buy it tomorrow.

> decent, interesting 5-row qwerty phone

If you're in the US and are on a CDMA network, there's the DROID 4/Photon Q for Verizon and Sprint, respectively.

Outside of that I'm not aware of any recent phones with a keyboard, unfortunately.

Good point. I am on GSM in the US but also prefer an international phone.

Its annoying that QWERTY Androids seem exclusive to the US. I guess Europeans demand custom layouts, and because of that we get nothing :(

Here is GSMArenas list of QWERTY androids released in 2012-2013

http://tinyurl.com/qwertyandroids

edit: interesting that almost all those devices are based on the same MSM8960 SoC

The Droid 4 runs on any GSM network -- as long as it's not in the USA, those are backlisted somewhere very deep in the phone. I have ran mine in Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary. It's not even hard to root and adjust build.props then throw in a micro SIM and off you go.

I understand. While I mostly use my keyboard for emails and text, you want every character to be available. I've gone from a G1 to a touch only phone, to replace it later with an imported Droid 4 with roughly the same specs as the phone I already had, just because of the keyboard.

"I want to be able to access the audio stream programmatically, which is not possible on 99% of android phones."

The N900's OS uses PulseAudio.

Examples: I can redirect audio output to the FM transmitter and instantly have the FM radio in any pre-bluetooth car become a giant speakerphone. I have tiny applications for recording calls (intercepting the audio stream between the GSM radio and the amp), and other applications for recording from the mic directly (for verbal note-taking).

glabifrons, you are hellbanned as of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6246450 for no obvious reason.

Thanks... extremely confusing since it still has one point, it apparently wasn't downvoted and I don't see how I violated any of the guidelines.

How is it that you can see my postings? Is it your extremely high karma?

I have showdead turned on. For what it's worth, you no longer appear to be hellbanned.

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