Neo900 Hacker Phone Reaches Minimum Number of Pre-Orders For Production

First time accepted submitter wick3t writes "The Neo900 fundraising campaign has already achieved the milestone of 200 pre-orders which means that mass production is now feasible. This follows a successful first prototype that was showcased at the OpenPhoenux-Hard-Software-Workshop 2013. Their next target is 1000 pre-orders as they aspire to reduce the production costs of each device." For those not familiar, the Neo 900 is an offshoot of the OpenMoko GTA04 designed for use in the popular Nokia N900 case (and, yes, they're fixing the weak usb port).

How exciting!

[mr_jrt]

I've been following this very, very, closely. I adore my N900...I just wish it was a little closer to my beloved Debian than it is...not to mention with the closed source UI code replaced with open code. I was tempted to do some of that work myself (and/or join some of the people doing similar things), but it was hard to justify the time cost on what is essentially a dead piece of hardware.

...with the potential for new devices however....things become a lot more interesting.

Personally, I never really bought into the Meego changes...I felt too much of Maemo's "Debian" roots were lost thanks to the merge with the more Redhat-based Moblin, and I'd be much more interested in going back the other way, though the developers working on the continuation of Meego (Nemo et al) have done amazing work, cumulating in Jolla's new phone running Sailfish. I concluded (as, it seems, have many others) the best approach for my aims was to take the working Maemo 5 system and slowly rewrite the closed components one by one whilst simultaneously separately rebuilding the foundations on top of a more standard Debian base, essentially so you can have operational testing of things like communications features much quickly. There's been a lot of good work by the Maemo community to this end.

All in all, very exciting. I'm hoping to order a couple of boards to revitalise a damaged spare N900 I have here, and if it works out well, my main one too :)

Re:Ubuntu Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this phone get produced but the Ubuntu Edge doesn't?

Because one (Ubuntu EDGE) is a vaporware consisting of couple PhotoShop images and the other (Neo900) is a in-detail specified open hardware project based on the proven N900 lineage, built by community with long years of building open hardware smartphones (Neo FreeRunner, GTA04) ?

Price.

[MrEricSir]

Because Ubuntu Edge cost four times as much? $625 was a lot to spend on a product that hadn't even been built, especially from a company that has no previous record when it comes to hardware.

Re:Great and wonderful...

[Unknown Lamer]

According to their FAQ [neo900.org], the modem will support the UMTS frequencies used by both AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.

Re:resistive touchscreen Luddites.

[wick3t]

Have you actually used the N900 touchscreen? There are many bad resistive touchscreens but the N900's is not one of them. The FAQ [neo900.org] explains why the resistive touch screen is the superior choice for the target audience of this device. Remember that this device is not trying to compete with Android or iOS but it's aim is to provide functionality that you would find in a general purpose computer, hence multi-touch in not a priority.