I finally had some time tonight to play with the Neo. A few months ago I had put Ubuntu on an old Thinkpad. I dug that sucker out and booted it up. After a small amount if fiddling, rebooting the Neo,  setting modes, usb com program, plug cable in, etc., I had the device booting to OpenMoko. Not that painful at all.  And not bad for a guy that has been doing Windows programming for a long while. Back to the command line…

Let’s remember that this is a developers device. The (Version 2) next hardware version will look very different on the inside. WIFI, new GPU, and a beefed up CPU to name a few things. The outside of the next unit I understand will remain the same in Version 2. So in reality, as someone on a list mentioned, this is like getting the iPhone 2 years before launch. So all commentary needs to be taken with these facts in mind.

It takes about 30 to 40 seconds to boot your Linux phone. Never before has one witnessed hundred of lines of geek processes instantiating before one’s eyes. But the beauty is that one to many of these processes could be your very own creation. Core processes if you like.

For a smart phone/PDA this thing is diminutive. Small. The screen could be bigger. Compared to the iPhone it’s not even close. This get’s tied back to usability – so an important fact. The old man (that’s moi) found it hard to see the text. UI’s will get better on the Neo – I’m sure of it.

The phone charges via the USB cable, so I left it to to charge. I hope that’s what its’ doing right now. The next steps are to get a development environment put together and get an overlay of some simple program to work. I’ll do some more playing and post some more pics soon.