Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Because my TOHKBD is currently 4000 km away from me. :D

Thanks mr_pingu, excellent news.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Big thanks for the pointer this post is rather interesting.
(Also we could point to XWayland that is Xserver running on top of a Wayland compositor, so you can use X11 apps on a Wayland server.
But I have personnally NO experience whatsover with this kind of stacks)

The Bulgarian guys of Olimex have toyed with modem on AllWinner, both in their blogs, and as an add-on module for their AllWinner boards.
But indeed, it's a separate chip, kind of the same solution used by old OMAP based smartphones (early iPhone-s, early Pre-s back in the Palm era, various OpenMoko boards and the current Pyra),
which might be an advantage for some cases (the modem definitely won't hack your whole phone in qualcomm's "Modem-as-a-Northbridge"-style)
but is a clear drawback in terms of physical space (just compare the clunkiness of Pyra, or OpenMoko to similarly-featured phones back then)

(Though I've personnally never felt the need for- , nor even understood the logic of smartphones so thin you could cut cheese with them)

BTW: Olimex seems to do quite some AllWinner PCB designs (including some do-it-yourself laptop kits), so they might be available as potential contact with questions regarding the feasibility a potential AllWinner phone PCB.

Any chance that this connection could expose lanes that could be useful for 3rd party hackers ? (I2C? UART? SPI? ... dream... USB ?) or are these connections extremely keyboard specific (a bunch of GPIO acessing some grid-chip with no re-usable protocol).

(And again: does the PCB have lanes/contacts for wireless charging like lots of modern phones ?)

...or unless you want to make a High-DPI printer for Polaroid film.

(I'm joking, but Fujifilm have exactly done that : a Wifi-enabled device that internally uses a High-DPI OLED screen to transfer picture from your smartphone to their "Instax" brand of Polaroid film)

My opinion exactly.

SFOS bring a gorgeous UI together with access to android Apps.

It's hard for a new system to gain market without being able to tap into the over-massive App ecosystems (and with Apple being completely closed, that only leaves Android on the table).

That was the downfall of webOS (Palm bet on the wrong horse. Back when they started working on webOS and Pre phones, PalmOS used to be a big player, so they made sure to have their device compatible with legacy PalmOS apps, by featuring the "Classic" emulator.
But by the time the device finally shipped, PalmOS has more or less died as a platform and Android was the app ecosystem most are using. There was some attempt to get Myriad on webOS, but HP shut down the whole webOS platform and sold it to LG before we got AlienDalvik on webOS)..

That is also the reason of the slow decline of Windows on mobile phone (Microsoft hoped that their "Metro" platform could become a 3rd relevant ecosystem next to Apple and Android, but despite their well known name, they didn't succeed.
Though at some point of time they realized they need to tap into one of the larger ecosystems, but ultimately failed.
WSL - Windows Service for Linux - is what they managed to salvage out of these attempts).

The fact that you can also run Android Apps and thus can still use your phone for all the things for which companies didn't bother to make a QML app (e.g.: my local Car Sharing company) is a big reason why it managed to survive.

This is doing to be difficult
As your booloader is unlocked (which BTW is very good),
nothing would prevent someone to buy a cheaper andoid phone,
get a more expensive SFOS phone and copy the BTRFS (or LVM EXT4) root partition from one phone to another.

I think you should mostly count on :
- SFOS fans being more or less honnest. (It's a small community, I think most of the SFOS fans would be happy to give money for SFOS support)
- or alternatively sell the Android-only version with a locked bootloader that prevents non-authorised OS installation (as most non-power users don't need to replace OSes, I'm not sure it they mind.
That there are user who might want to experiment with their phone but hate SFOS and won't be happy to be forced to pay for SFOS)
- or last solution : sell all the phones at the same price (so there's no real incentive to get one but pirate the other). i.e.: the cost of development of SFOS isn't only spread accross the "power-user" edition of the phone, but accros all the buyers.
Bonus : a buyer can always legally switch to SFOS at a later point (by replacing the root partition)
Problem: some people might complain that their money gets to SFOS (Dave ? :-D )

Might explain why Palm (and then HP) went for portait orientation on their Phone with keyboards. (And blackberry before them).

...happy to be in one of the QWERTZ-keyboard using french speaking countries. :-D

Some people do it just for the LULZ, for **** and giggles.

Other also like to hack things and might have werid legitimate uses for installing full custom Linux on a phone (I certainly have done at some point in the past on my OpenMoko).

There are also people who would like to use software not ported to SFOS.
LibreOffice was mentionned above for productivity.
But it could also be emulators not ported to SFOS (e.g.: MAME).
Special remote access consoles (VNC, or even weirder : the Java applets for VNC that are used by some "lights-out" management like IPMI or Intel ME)
etc.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Or and one last hardware question :

You mentioned the back-facing cameras where the best that you could get.

(both are 13MP)

Do you know the physical size of the sensors ?
(Maybe not 2/3" as in dedicated camera an a few Nokia and Sony camera/phone hybrids)

And what is the optical part / lens ?

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Thanks again for your information! It is very helpful! And I will leave my comment later...

To this question yes I will give the detail specs later, perhaps with the compont number and you can look into options tinkering with it. :)

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

I never asked myself that question before, never having looked at a keyboard when abroad in another French speaking country...
So now, after looking at wikipedia, I know that there are about as many QWERTZ variants as there are countries using them, each replacing the special keys to their own missing symbols... and same for other mainstream layouts.

So, when one think that QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, BEPO, Dvorak, ... are a nightmare, it gets worst when you delve into the details and see that each layout has variants... :eek:

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

True, although I think QWERTZ is about as bad diverse as it gets, don't think AZERTY has so many different layouts depending on countries. One more reason to migrate to QWERTY US_International! :rolleyes:

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Its beautiful. :eek:

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Sailfish is being hailed by some as radically different but I have always found it disappointing how much Jolla tries to mimic Android. I guess those who think it is "so different" have never seen something really different, like e.g. Maemo.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder. I say, give the user the option.

Re: The choice of OS of the new QWERTY device project
 

Some interesting ideas in this post, but please don't do this! How many "non-power users" do you think will buy the device? Bit patronising to assume people who use Android aren't "power users", and plenty of Android users like to use custom ROMs!


Just ask people to pay for the image,

or

talk to Jolla about shipping the open source parts of SFOS and adding the option to buy AD and the other proprietary bits as an app in the store. Jolla has been talking about paid apps in the store for ages, implementing it now could be useful for the xperia port as well as this project.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

As far as i know, the iPhone Plus-models (5,5") allow the user to use the phone in landscape mode, with splitscreen support.