Today's smartphone industry is controlled by giant tech companies with impenetrable black-box devices running proprietary software, who engage in patent lawsuits and baby-panda eating in their spare time. This last claim may not technically be true, but I figure it's election season, why can't I get in on the fun?
Many may hope for an alternative phone which offers more freedom for the user, more transparency and more adaptability. But a viable consumer option may be a long way off.
So far there has only been one option for a smartphone which is truly open and free (as in freedom) – the Openmoko project from 2008, which has now been reborn as Open Phoenux. Mine arrived a couple of weeks ago.
Not only does it run free software, but the hardware is also open source – the manual comes complete with board layouts and schematics for each of its parts.
Why would anyone want an open source phone in the first place? For the same price, you could get a shiny new iPhone.
First of all, the Open Phoenux is not meant to compete head-to-head with Apple and Samsung – not yet, anyway. It's not a phone built for the casual consumer. It is a phone by geeks, for geeks – a developmental playground to learn how a phone works, to write operating systems and other mobile software, to hook up to different devices, to run hacks and hobby projects. By keeping the hardware and development open, it means that the experience and improvements of the developers are shared with the commons, for anyone to use and build upon. It makes it easier for people to develop new, unexpected uses for mobile technology. When a user has a better understanding of what's actually inside their phone, they might also start to think a little bit more about where everything came from. With open hardware, the components can easily be replaced and upgraded, making for longer smartphone lifecycles. Ever tried upgrading an iPhone's hardware? Apple have special proprietary screws just to keep you out of 'your' phone. They don't want you to be able to change the battery. They don't want you to understand why your phone isn't working, they just want you to buy a new one. At least some people are trying to fight this tendency:
My Open Phoenux came with Linux pre-installed, but in order to actually make calls you need to install a smartphone operating system. I settled on QtMoko as it was said to be the easiest to get started. I realised this was going to be a technical challenge for someone who has only been using free software for a couple of months, and had never even partitioned a hard drive, but I was prepared to be patient, to be thorough, and above all to be very, very careful.
I checked and double-checked my way through the instructions: Card formatted correctly! QtMoko prepared in the right way! Battery inserted! Device turned on! Bootloader! This is all going remarkably well, I thought. My internal high-fives quietly disappeared when I realised the phone had stopped responding.
Replacing the battery did nothing. Threatening it back to life with a fierce shake of my fist may have been somewhat optimistic. Shaking two fists proved more therapeutic, though yielded similar results.
Somewhere along the line I must have taken a wrong turn. In my hand I held more technology than all the Apollo missions combined, and I had turned it into something with all the computing power of a moon rock.
I needed help. As with any open source project, the place to turn is the community itself.
Those who responded on the mailing list managed to work out the problem, and I can proudly say that my phone did not die in vain – they have now fixed the installation package and improved the documentation to stop anyone else following my own wobbly footsteps to oblivion.
Meanwhile I must wait until I can get my hands on the right kind of cable to be able to reanimate my phone and make that long-awaited first call. Until then I'm left coming up with new uses for a temporarily-dead open source smartphone around the house:
Any other ideas?
I'll keep you posted on my progress resuscitating this Open Phoenux, and if you're interested in this area, keep an eye on developments with the free software operating system Firefox OS, and also the Fairphone initiative to bring more transparency, choice and accountability to phone production.
UPDATE: IT'S ALIVE! ALIIIVE!
I mean, it's not necessarily functional yet, but at least it turns on..
Comments
interesting. wrote on 11.06.12, 8:21am:
I'm all for open source. I really believe in it. However, open source projects typically fall far short of proprietary ones for some really important reasons; chief among them being, as you found out, that they typically are not terrifically friendly to folks who aren't experts in the field of software.
Much like the folks who make the point that Github could revolutionize democracy if we all just used it, it really points up the fact that your average American just isn't all that interested in looking under the hood.
I imagine these sorts of projects might see more success if they were led by designers rather than techies; techies, in my experience (and I've been using these interwebs since 1200 baud) designers have far more experience in creating products that really speak to us in our own languages (formal and interactive).
Sam Muirhead wrote on 11.06.12, 12:13pm:
This is a bit of a special situation though - the Open Phoenux is not a consumer product, and they make it very clear before buying. It's just a first step towards an open alternative.
There are so many barriers to overcome before a truly open phone is a possibility, and a lot of that is dealing with equipment manufacturers. This phone is assembled in Germany but the components come from different parts of the world. Each individual manufacturer has to be convinced into releasing schematics and documentation of their hardware, releasing free drivers etc. Plus with a small orders and small budgets it can be difficult to do the convincing. Prototyping with hardware is of course a much slower and costlier process than open source software, so any problems take a while to be sorted out.
There's still a lot of work to be done on the hardware and software before it is in any way ready for the consumer market, but the idea seems to be that the project should grow slowly and steadily and improve as more developers come on board. As it gets closer to consumer level, yes, I agree, some well-thought out user interface, experience and product design would go a long way to encourage more users, but you don't have to worry about teaching your parents how to use this anytime soon.
You are SO wrong about the panda eating. Steve Jobs would never eat a panda. It's two colors.
:D