R. Tyler Ballance has received his Neo1973 OpenMoko phone and he's very excited. Here's why.
So far I've been able to use my Cingular SIM card, if you use AT&T/Cingular, you can check if yours is supported on the wiki. I can run the general built in suite of applications without too much trouble, I also made a phone call, which worked!
Yes, believe it or not. His phone could make a phone call! Of course, as the phone runs Linux it's really surprising that the product actually does what it is advertised to do. But yes, it does make phone calls (or at least a phone call).
Unfortunately however the latest build that I have on my Neo doesn't have sound properly working, which sagacis from the #openmoko channel on Freenode is helping me with currently. I'm a bit over-excited so I'll let the images do the rest of the talking for me.
The sound doesn't work. That's no biggie. When I tried installing Linux on my PC once, sound also didn't work, neither did my graphics card, but I'm sure that's a feature. It comes with the territory. Luckily there's an IRC channel, on Freenode.org no less, home of all free thinkers (a.k.a. morons) to help you out with your sound problems. But problems with a device that should just work are not annoying to Mr. Ballance, no he's actually over-excited because of them.
But now the best part of this first look at OpenMoko. Screenshots! You know, when I mentioned the booting procedure, which, according to my guesses would take a few minutes, I was kidding. I mean, it's a phone, there's no real boot time in a phone right? Well, OpenMoko actually has a very visible boot sequence. You guess what it shows.
Ahuh. You guessed right.
A Linux CLI boot screen. Awesome. This really is Linux on your phone.
