Perpetual quest for GNU smartphone

[Shlomi Loubaton]

2009/5/29 Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel at mamane.lu>
>
>   - That you can get root access on a G1 is an accident in history, not
>   by design.

An accident which tends to occur over and over again.
(see link in my previous message)

>
>   - The shipped applications have a very closed mindset: upload all
>   your data to Google or suffer. A friend of mine got a G1, and I was
>   evaluating it for my parents to eventually get one. Really, the
>   only thing I wanted to check is that they would be able to import
>   contacts (and hopefully appointments) from their old Treo/PalmOS
>   smartphones, via their desktop computer. Oh, boy, I was in for a
>   surprise. The only way to do that is to get a Google account,
>   UPLOAD YOUR CONTACTS TO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT and have your G1
>   synchronise with your Google account. THERE IS NO WAY TO GET
>   CONTACTS IN YOUR G1 SHORT IF SHARING THEM WITH GOOGLE. A company
>   that is known to have trouble "forgetting" stuff you delete from
>   your account. That's *so* not acceptable to me. That's utterly
>   broken design; I don't want to have anything to do with
>   applications written by people that think like that.

What's keeping you or anyone else from writing applications for this
phone that doesn't require syncing with a google account?

>
>   With some Googling, you can find third-party applications that
>   sort-of patch a beginning of a brittle solution. So it is not a
>   total blocker, but it let me a very bad taste of the platform in my
>   mouth.

If you compile it - they will come. If there will be demand for such
third-party application, you'll see more of them.
This platform still sound more "tasty" than the iPhone or even
OpenMoko with it's "open hardware" .... pffffff!! (
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GTA02_Hardware#Graphics.2F3D_Acceleration
).

BTW: iPhone is not a bad GNU phone at all (jailbroken). Somebody
created a portage-apt-get-like system for it. You can run GNU tools
and even ssh server.

Shlomil.