The idea of using GTA04 and N900 as a base is meant to deal with exactly those problems you mentioned. Porting Fremantle is supposed to give people some rock-solid base, and we need hardware that's similar to N900's in order to do that. GTA04 base makes board engineering much easier, and as GTA04 is already quite similar to N900, in some places we can piggy back on work done by Nokia for N900.

This way, we won't lose any freedom open devices like GTA02 and GTA04 can give us, and on the other side we (hopefully) gain stability, power management and usability of N900.

Battery life should be somewhere around N900's, but well, it's a bit too early to judge that (at the end might be better or worse, it all depends on many factors).

So yes, I believe Neo900 should be at least as good as N900 as daily phone, maybe even better due to faster CPU and bigger RAM.

About repairs - you'll of course get standard warranty, if I'm not mistaken for two years. After that, you should still be able to get some support, either from community or Goldelico (Nikolaus is very active on community mailling lists).

I can't say anything about how servicing would look like, I don't know. With Freerunner, some resellers offered such services. But judging from how GTA04 is handled, Goldelico is pretty friendly to community and you should be able to find some solution with them.

Is Fremantle already ported to GTA04? I don't even care that much about the OS it uses as long as the core functionality of the phone works and is not buggy. I just checked the mailing list of GTA04 searching for user experiences.

I found this one:

" For me GTA04 worked quite nice as a phone. It has many positives like fast
GUI, nice GPS etc...
but there are two phone issues you might be avare of:
1/ There might be some bug in modem because it sometimes restarts - but it's
quite rare and i can live with it.
2/ The power management is for me on the edge of usablility. If you dont mind
charging the phone everyday or maybe every second day then it's ok."

I remember after fully charging my Freerunner, it was only just managing to get me through a working day (about 8 hours). I can live with daily charging, but certainly not less.
The restart bug that the user is talking about is also something I remember from the Freerunner. That was quite annoying and not rare.

So basically my follow up question is how solid performs GTA04 currently? Are there open bugs?

Goldelico as seller is fine for me. I live in the Netherlands so if there are issues I can easily ship the phone to Germany for repair.

Thanks for your answer dos1. It took away some of my worries, but to be honest not all

not yet. we will most likely start with this, since it's not a very reasonable approach to start porting fremantle only when we got first Neo900 prototypes ready.

Powersaving is much related to the complete OS. Maemo uses a completely different approach than former openmoko distros (all of them) which did (and still do) suspend-to-ram. Thanks to zeroclock and other supporting OMAP-specific technics which were not available on former GTA01/2 platforms, maemo never suspends but just idles in a very power-economic state. One of the reasons why we hope for much better standby times on GTA04(-N900) with fremantle.

cheers
jOERG

This is a very nice idea and I wish you the best of the lucks as I have always hoped for a truly open "keyboard'd PDA" (ie phone part not essential for me).

My dream would be a device that would resemble a vanilla x86 PC more than a "modern-day smartphone", as in, you have a very manipulable bootloader, can install a vanilla kernel, and get most of the functionality with such vanilla kernel, including reasonable battery life (that is, power saving stuff should also work more or less with a vanilla kernel).

Sadly, the use of a OMAP3 already means that graphics is going to be closed. Without the help of a "heavyweight" like Nokia, you're also most definitely NOT going to get binaries matching your kernel/userspace, so we'll have to scrape them from Android.... which is basically the same problem Jolla has. And if you need Android stuff, then, well....

I would be happy to be proven wrong. At least, we'll have fully documented baseband, GPS, USB stuff , PCB, ... I hope.


On the other hand, making a "Fremantle succesor" is going to be harder. If only because the theme and pixart at least is not opensource and thus it won't "look the same". From that, it can only go downhill, depending on the number of packages you already have free replacements for...

Unlike some others who have posted here that are saying that they would rather wait for jolla or mozilla or canonical or tizen ...and I do wish nothing but the best for their releases...the reality is that these devices will be practically closed ...practically meaning practical...in the sense of being pragmatic that is...With many past devices and platforms...some of the closed source aspects were because
1- there were no open alternatives
2- hw and/or sw specific issues which prevented more openess
3- deliberate corp. action to keep proprietary aspects...proprietary
4- and/or the motive of planned obsolesence to keep production rolling smoothly.
I do have a hard hard time believing that larger corporations wish to give or sell "open anything" that they could be losing out on profits somewhere from ...and rightly so...the costs have to be accounted for....but I am dubious that the grail lies with hoping and waiting for the big boys to step up. There is a 2nd set of posts that believe that taking what is given by the giants.... however closed it is...as long as it works....is our only option...and personally I have to ...must.... differ with them as well.
I do hold out a great deal of hope that 'tween openmoko, goldendelish, the gta04 and n900 and all the people in between ...that at least we will have a (hopefully more open) , better functioning device that helps all parties all around. Considering looking at this wiki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._mobile_phones.
If the neo900 doesn't get off the ground...IMO getting a gta04 and messing around with it on my own is my next option (I'm a heck of a carver ...so making an ornate case out of elk or moose antler has intrigued me)...the other option IMO isn't an option.....a wait of 5 to 10 years or more until an open alternative linux pc/phone comes about again.
The (at least my view) bleak outlook does nothing but reinforce my stance on how imperative it is to work and succeed with the neo900...the short and long term benefits not just to the end user...but the wider spread of inclusion to many new/old users and other communities considering the alt. os's applicable ...and such continuing collaborations 'tween maemo and goldendelish. will/or could produce in the future make my stance even firmer.
Even if the cost is well nigh insanely prohibitive due to lack of people pulling out wallets...it may mean I won't get 2 neo900's 1 for me and 1 for the lady...
but I sure as hell am getting at least 1.
Flat out.

endsormeans,

many thanks for this brilliant analysis and support of what we're aiming at. I couldn't have put it any better. Now if only a lot more users would understand that concept.
Meanwhile, I just want to let you know that Nikolaus and me are working together, evaluating what needs to get done to make Neo900 become a reality. The N900 device for Nikolaus is on its way, should arrive in maybe 1 week at him. Until then we're sorting circuit issues like adding eMMC/2nd_uSD. Till now all looks rather promising.
OOOH DAMN, and I will send my bare PCB to him instantly, I wonder how I could forget about that.

cheers
jOERG

Voted for 600€ but after carefully reading every post, i would pay even more! Especialy if, all the "if's" become reality!
I'm using N900 as my only phone since it was released and now i own 2 N900. I would consider donating one of the them, to help this project become true!
Really wish the best for the future of the best smartphone ever created!
Cheers guys

Future owner of Neo900 !

Thanks koznj!

so, counting you (for 700+) and the other non-tmo-member's vote (800) in. we currently got

209 voters.
>=700: 20
>=600: 37
>=500: 73

/j

I didn't vote as I expect my "count me in" statement to be counted as "700+", posting just if it isn't clear

Just added a 700 Euro vote. If you will manage to create a N900 successor that is demonstrable bugfree, open and you are also able to do that within a certain time frame I am in.