Perpetual quest for GNU smartphone

[Shay Ohayon]

I have a T-Mobie G1 (bought in the states) and am pretty happy with
it. It is pure Linux in its core, has an SDK for application
development and the whole source is available
(http://source.android.com/). I am not too interested on GPS
applications or navigation but it has a pretty good GPS (tough it eats
the battery horribly) and the Google Maps support is pretty good.
There is also a talk given by Gilad Ben-Yoseff (anyone know if the
slides of the presentation are available somewhere?) and the
documentation for development is pretty good.

Hebrew support is fine, you just install the fonts and its there
(gilad also has a post about this) and someone wrote an application
called "hebkeys"  that i havent tested but gives you a virtual
keyboard on screen for hebrew typing.

It has full QWERTY keyboard which is pretty comfortable for typing and
the screen is big enough for surfing and ssh'ing (it is a bit smaler
than an iphone's screen, but you have the keyboard separated from it).

good luck on your quest,

Shay
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Arie Skliarouk <skliarie at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> For a long time I find myself looking for an open smartphone, with
> Linux and GPS.
>
> Initially I had high hopes for OpenMoko's platform, but now I think it
> is dying for several reasons:
>  * their's latests phone model Freerunner has audio issues
>  * It has weak connectivity (GPRS)
>  * There is no quality applications for it (like GPS turn-by-turn
> navigation) due to chicken-egg problem and lack of DRM.
>
> This makes me look into direction of Android G1. It is too young to
> have elaborated applications support, but it already has
> http://www.andnav.org/ that uses OpenStreetMap data.
>
> Currently there is no coverage for Israel though:
> http://www.andnav.org/images/stories/news/coverage/
>
> Do anybody knows more about andnav2 and Israel support?
>
> Also, do any of the Israeli phone carriers plan to import Android-based phones?
>
> --
> Arie
>
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