Seeing the quirky, totally open
Greenphone exit stage left brings a tear to our eye, we admit, but at least the torch to a promising successor. Trolltech -- maker of the Greenphone and the Linux-based Qtopia platform it runs -- has announced that they've sold clean out of the handsets having accomplished its reason for existence: hyping Qtopia itself. Trolltech readily admits that it's a software company, and now that Qtopia's out there in developers' hands (and possibly now with a
strong ally in Motorola), it returns to its software roots and points in the direction of OpenMoko's up-and-coming
Neo1973 open source phone for future devs looking to follow in the Greenphone's footsteps. Of course, the consumer version of the Neo isn't out just yet, but Trolltech says it hopes to be making announcements about support for additional devices in the near future -- so any way you slice it, the spirit of the Greenphone plods happily on.
posted Oct 22nd 2007 12:34AM
The Greenphone reminds me of a Sony Ericsson, while the other one reminds me of a cheap Chinese phone.
Coincidentially, it is a (relatively) cheap Chinese phone. Taiwanese, actually.
Mark,
You really should read up on the Neo1973... because if you look past its appearance, it is quite a remarkable (completely open) phone.
Funny that the makers of the UI library that KDE is based off of feels no inhibitions about recommending something based on GTK, KDE's rival GNOME's UI library. Guess developers are more sensible than their loyal fan(atic)s, although to be fair Trolltech doesn't actually make KDE.