Trolltech will ship an “open” Linux-based phone in September. The “Greenphone” features a user-modifiable Linux OS, and is meant to jumpstart a third-party native application ecosystem for Linux-based mobile phones.
Trolltech to Offer “Open” Linux Mobile Phone
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Smart move Trolltech! I guess that means they are feeling the heat from all of the /Nokia/Maemo/OpenHand work on embedded gtk and realize it’s time to work a bit harder.
With big companies like Motorolla shipping most of their new smart phones on the Linux platform, is this the tipping point?
Linux makes sense for a market like mobilephones and small handheld devices. How much would a copy of windows CE one one of those cost the hardware vendor?
With big companies like Motorolla shipping most of their new smart phones on the Linux platform, is this the tipping point?
Do the Q models run on Linux?
no, windows mobile 5.
I guess that means they are feeling the heat from all of the /Nokia/Maemo/OpenHand work on embedded gtk and realize it’s time to work a bit harder.
Sorry, but I doubt anyone is feeling the heat from those things. They’re very scarce, few people buy them, at best they’re a beta test model for Nokia thrown to the open source community and they’re not mobile phones. I don’t see any Nokia phone I buy using GTK, sorry.
This is about phones.
I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time.
Shame it only comes in green though … ugh.
I’ve been waiting for this as well. Fortunately for me, I love green and I’m already drooling over the phone. Too bad it’s not ready for general consumption just yet.
It’s never going to be ready for general consumption. The phone’s part of a development kit. It’s a ‘reference platform’.
Anybody who is going to want to sell a Linux phone is going to have to design their own variant, get an ODM to manufacture it, and, if they want to ship it in the US, get the FCC to approve it.
And the US carriers aren’t going to let an unlocked version of it onto their nets anyway.
And here we go, I just was waiting for this. So after the open console ( the gp2x) here goes the open cell phone.
I’m a bit disappointed it is not a clamshell ( hey tastes are tastes
) and a bit surprised about the fact it is sold with a GTK kit.
I wonder if it will be sold only to developer or such.
Anyway it goes, it will be a wonderful laboratory. I hope they wont ask 400 euro that for now…
Where did you read “GTK”? It comes as a developer sdk for Trolltech’s Qtopia Phone Edition, which is based on Qtopia Core (formerly known as Qt/ Embedded)
Looks great, I even like the colour.
But I just want to use it, not develop apps for it. To bad jou can’t just buy one seperately.
Also to bad that is has no EDGE and/or UMTS support.
I also love it, it looks great
But after developers start making apps for it and it’s been through some testing, trolltech will probably start selling them…
The linuxdevices article talks about it having WiFi but Trolltech doesn’t list that as hardware feature. If this has WiFi as well as some sane way to listen to MP3, I absolutely must have one
If it doesn’t, maybe one can use those ultra tiny MiniSD WLAN cards from Spectec? (pending someone writes drivers)
Edited 2006-08-15 09:09
The Greenphone does not have wifi.
Read,on 3/4 of the page it says:
The device also includes WiFi, and comes with SIP middleware supporting VoIP calls.
Wow Linux/Qt based phone is what I _must_ have. I’m even happy that it comes as part of SDK, I would definitely write some fancy Qt apps for it
. I only wish that price would be resonable… don’t want to spend fortune on something that can be pick-pockeded from me 
is this opensourced hardware?! i will applaud!
it’s not
Don’t even care thats its gree, I kinda liek the green color…if this really has wifi and vopi support..it would be a awesome piece of hardware .I dont be developing any apps, but I would love to have one,and being that im with cingular and its GSM, u could just drop in your sim card and go.if the “hit’ isnt some outlandish price. I may have to pick up one on principle alone!
Except for the components that interface with the baseband processor, everything in Qtopia Phone Edition necessary to develop applications is available under an open source license.. Hey i like green as long as its under $300 ill be getting it. I WANT this phone!
http://www.qtopia.net/modules/devices/ has some more info on this. Still doubting if this really has WIFI onboard (it’d be a killer device if it has).
The user guide has more info.
It describes wifi functionality (LAN) but it does not
mention if it’s optional/addon or on another model.
Also there is no SIP/media player application on the current version of the phone.
I hope some version of the finished product will have wifi, 3G and MP3 support, it’d be a great phone.
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I was just having a conversation the other day about how awesome it would be to have an open, linux-based mobile phone to develop for. We concluded that it probably wouldn’t happen because mobile carriers are all about locking down their networks. This is the problem with developing for the Hiptop/Sidekick for example. I’m very happy to be proven wrong.
“It is based on a dual-core Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale processor clocked at 312MHz. It has 64MB of RAM, and 128MB of flash, expandable through a mini-SD card slot.” Dua-core? Is that right?
Probably. Cell phones are often dual-core (or at least dual-processor) with one processor managing the radio and the other doing everything else. There are a lot of reasons for this. It makes regulatory compliance easier. It makes it easier for radio makers to keep the proprietary bits proprietary. It makes the OS design simpler, since the hard-real time bits go with the radio and the rest is just another multithreaded multimedia os.