Perpetual quest for GNU smartphone

[Matan Ziv-Av]

On Tue, 26 May 2009, Arie Skliarouk 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?


There is a better choice than Android: maemo. See http://www.maemo.org for 
details. In short, this is a debian based system, which includes GTK, QT, 
Python, Perl. Many debian/ubuntu arm binary packages can be installed and

While Maemo devices are available for almost 4 years, the first Maemo 
based phone is going to be released soon:
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/05/24/exclusive-everything-there-is-to-know-about-nokias-next-tablet/
While not listed in the article, the device will include GPS.

-- 
Matan.