Now this would be a killer for me!

this is ********************* stop it you guys wont provide any form of sat transmitions except gps i know now dont reply and say yes i might run out of the hospital to aquire a licence ::

http://gmr.osmocom.org/trac/
You know osmocom is "not far away" from openmoko

on a sidenote: I'm pondering about that 2mm spacer layer. It could get built in such a way that it closes the basically open and dust-scooping half above the keyboard. This (together with another few small mechanical/ID changes like closing the AV plug aperture) would largely increase the survival chances of a device dropped into water for 0.8s, and should also help when you're at the beach with all that sand.
/j

Wow, this project gets more amazing on a day-by-day basis! When are you starting the fundraiser?

And now a question... How are you going to get all that hardware powered with the standard N900 battery? Even with the 1500mAh Polarcell... How good would e.g. the sattelite phone idea work?

That was an honest question, I have no idea about hardware design!

Since there is only this unhelpful no-no-no thread http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48224 I feel bad since I am also an antennas toward the sky kind of guy. I will make one OT post here, otherwise it needs to be in another thread.

Satcom could be accomplished in the following ways:

Bluetooth link to a sat-SMS gadget like this has already been done with the N900 http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=86315 about $100 for the hackable puck and cheap enough monthly service for emergencies.

If you are a licensed radio amateur connect with an audio cable a yaggi antenna and a dual band walkie-talkie using fldigi on days that the ISS is doing packet radio BBS or slow scan TV downlink http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=82853 if you are just doing voice you only to the space station or the few remaining satellites you still need your N900 for tracking satellite overpasses, I use gpredict, thanks to Xes for compiling it for the N900 http://ge.tt/7mbX97r

Use your N900 with our very inexpensive software defined radio receiver, about $15 delivered for the host mode adapter and USB dongle http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91182 with the right directional antenna you can listen to the amateur radio kids play with satellites or space station or grab weather satellite downlinks and decode them right in your phone, no transmit ability though.

Getting actual satellite telephony even if the N900 were a giant Motorola 1985 brick would be tricky, the frequency used is way out of band even if we had direct access to the radios inside the N900, the chunky spiral polarized antenna is half the size of the N900 and I think at least for Irridium the required hardware has not been made for years and new handsets are either from old stock or using either stockpiled Qualcom hardware or perhaps custom made chips, not an off the shelf solution AFAIK.
Below are the main players in the sat-phone game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmarsat

Sat phone won't work with the Neo900 alone, you definitely need a cradle that provides a battery and an antenna at least, even if you had a "GMR modem". Honestly Neo900 Thuraya phone is pretty far fetched, but at least not impossible. Motorola did similar thing, placing a rather normal GSM phone into a cradle with an antenna and quite some additional electronics. The OTA protocols are somewhat similar for GSM and GMR, and that's it. The Motorola cradle was quite above 1000$ iirc, and maybe that even been for Iridium and not Thuraya, can't recall anymore. [edit] Hmm, Thuraya sleeve phone, revival of the motorola cradle. And it has adapters for iphone4 and iphone5. An adapter for N900 isn't completely mad to figure.

For the rest of electronics in Neo900: it won't eat significanlty more power than Neo900. It's not that much different in the end.

/j

....i really can't imagine which kind of request (dream?) we will read in this thread on 25 december....

Yes, that was an Iridium, they had a thing in the 90s where the SIM would bill worldwide roaming GSM calls to your Irridium account when you had the phone popped out of the cradle.

At this point there is no reason for a cradle when you could bluetooth link any smartphone to a satcom gadget like the SPOT SMS thing above.

Someday in a very openmoko Stallmanesque future every gadget will have a great wideband SDR and it will just be a software hack and maybe an external antenna away form adding any wireless service you could want.

I just subscribed to the newsletter without having to confirm my e-mail address in any way. Luckily I typed the right one

(hint, hint, even though I guess the newsletter will be a low-volume one, some people might choose to abuse this lack of confirmation..)

Added: I did (later) receive a confirmation e-mail.