The physical design is excellent. The screen quality is awesome.
I started by flashing pre-built images to get something working. I flashed a new kernel and rootfs. The basic functionality is there, but things tend to crash a lot.
Building the software locally took quite some time, maybe close to a day on my laptop. The build tree is 11GB large. That is huge. Updating the software to the latest version and re-building it is pretty fast though; around a few minutes.
With todays’ build, I was finally able to make a voice call. The openmoko-dialer seems quite solid. What is missing is the audio settings. I’m now using alsactl -f /etc/alsa/gsmhandset.state restore to put the audio in the right state. There was a lot of echo and noise during the call.
Playing MP3 works fine. I was worried about performance problems, but the GUI is still responsive, even while copying a ~50MB file onto the 512MB mini-SD card. I discovered that the external audio connector isn’t a standard audio contact, it is smaller. I need to go out and buy a converter to be able to plug the neo into my stereo. It would have been nice if this cable had been included.
I briefly tried bluetooth, and at least the low-level stuff seems to be present and working. There is no GUI to power up the bluetooth chip though.
Have you tried sending/receiving sms?
Messaging doesn’t work right now.
The GUI (which seems to be a unified SMS/E-mail application) is mostly just a mockup, with some dummy e-mails and SMS. It just displays To/Subject, the message contents doesn’t seem to be displayed anywhere.
The medium-level gsmd interface doesn’t seem to work well:
root@fic-gta01:~$ libgsmd-tool -m shell
libgsm-tool – (C) 2006 by Harald Welte
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
?
# # A Answer incoming call
D Dial outgoing number
H Hangup call
O Power On
o Power Off
R Register Netowrk
T Send DTMF Tone
pd PB Delete (pb=index)
pr PB Read (pr=index)
prr PB Read Range (prr=index1,index2)
pf PB Find (pff=indtext)
pw PB Write (pw=index,number,text)
ps PB Support
sd SMS Delete (sd=index,delflg)
sl SMS List (sl=stat)
sr SMS Read (sr=index)
ss SMS Send (ss=number,text)
sw SMS Write (sw=stat,number,text)
q Quit
sl
# List SMS
Segmentation fault
root@fic-gta01:~$
Going down another level, I was able to send a SMS though:
root@fic-gta01:~$ cu -l /dev/ttySAC0
Connected.
at+cmgf=1
OK
at+cmgs=”0708…”
> test
%CPRI: 1,2
+CMGS: 1
OK
The SMS was received fine. This seems to need some work…
I want one, but I can’t really bring myself to spend money on a phone that doesn’t work (yet) ;-P