Robert Strohmeyer writes about the Open Cell Phone Project, a project intended to create an open software and hardware platform for the creation of GSM mobile devices. As Robert correctly comments, the way most mobile phones are made today (closed platforms, generally hard to modify) doesn’t provide very good support for the backyard hacker community.
“Hardware, however, is only half the solution. “The overarching problem,” Hamrick says, “is that it’s difficult for users to program phones or buy software to go with them.” A typical phone’s functions are limited by the service provider. Want to play a game on your mobile now? Give 5 or 10 bucks to your carrier and choose from a short list of titles. But the TuxPhone, built on the Linux operating system, lets developers write their own software and make it available to other users for free. One Homebrewer hopes to design a wireless music store that’s open to all cell users, regardless of their service provider – no more captive audiences and $2 downloads. (Of course, it’s not entirely free: You’ll still have to pay The Man for basic GSM service.)”
Link: DIY Cell Phone (wired.com)
Comments 2
Presumably these developers who want to be able to develop for their own phones are all signed up to BREW operators? Because otherwise, they could very easily just write some MIDP and download it for free – if they want to hack at lots of features of the phone, they can either pick a handset with a lot of optional API support or move up to a Symbian phone so they can really get into some C++ dev too. The hardware will also be way way higher spec than the stuff they can come up with on their own, because handset manufacturing is a cutthroat competitive market with very big companies employing lots of very good R&D people to keep their products on the cutting edge.
Never mind the possibility of their home brew OS messing up and bringing down parts of the network, which will not make them friends. There are also reasons why phones take a long time to get approved to connect to public networks.
This just shows complete and utter lack of understanding – they want it to be like their Linux PC, and nothing else will do. I do like the way that they value other developer’s time so little that they think $5 for a game which took a team several months to develop and QA is a complete rip off, though.
Posted 06 Jan 2007 at 6:49 pm ¶I can understand where you’re coming from, and you make some good points. But it would seem that some of the motivation for these people is just the fun of making something themselves – they’re hackers.
Posted 07 Jan 2007 at 3:01 am ¶Post a Comment