The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
Nov 19, 2013, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak
After unexpectedly successful launch of our fundraiser, the project is progressing well.
Thanks to amazing support from our community we're already past the first three phases of our fundraiser, reaching our first, monetary goal. Thank you! However, now we need to ensure that we'll be able to sell at least 200 devices, as that's the amount we've been using in our price calculations and feasibility evaluation. We assume that all donors pledging 100 € or more will want to use their rebate on finished device, so we count them as our customers. At this moment we only need 50 more potential Neo900 owners to go!
Of course the fundraiser is not the only thing happening in the project. The fundraiser kept us so busy that we failed to publish a new newsletter more timely, even though there're lots of stuff to report on. We've already designed first prototype PCB and ordered it, hoping to demonstrate the modem's functions (data, voice, GPS) and mechanical integration into the N900 case on first real hardware coming from this project at Open Hard- and Software Workshop in Garching (Munich), Germany, taking place 30. Nov - 1. Dec 2013. For those of you who cannot appear there in person we're going to provide YouTube live stream from the event. Stay tuned!
Some people were wondering how the battery hotswap feature is going to look like. Joerg has prepared a short video clip showing amazingly easy battery replacement procedure. The Neo900 is going to be designed in such a way that replacing battery will be possible without turning it off, even without attaching external power from USB!
Our web page is constantly getting some layout and content improvements. One of the most frequently asked questions was about the openness and freedom of the device and how we're going to reach our goals regarding user privacy with blackbox modem module. The answers are now available at our FAQ page.
We would also like to announce that we plan to publish EAGLE project files, allowing everyone with enough time, skills and money to improve on our work and do their own hardware modifications on the mainboards. This would make Neo900 the only phone available on the market with such degree of openness!
Our community is also progressing with their tasks - the Fremantle Porting Task Force project recently managed to boot Maemo 5 with recent version of Linux kernel (3.12) and came up with reverse engineered version of MCE daemon, responsible for controlling some peripherals of N900, bringing the project few steps closer to provide working Fremantle system on platforms like Neo900.
Thanks for following this project and stay tuned for more!
Phase I results - OHSW showcase »
The Neo900 project aims to provide a successor of N900 Nokia Internet Tablet™ device, with faster CPU, more RAM and LTE modem, basing efforts on an already existing, mature and stable free platform - the OpenPhoenux GTA04, following the spirit of freedom known from Openmoko devices.