| gr8 | Hi, just heard about the neo900. What is the current progress? The last post on https://neo900.org/#news is from January 2018 | 16:46 |
|---|---|---|
| gr8 | pardon, March | 16:47 |
| gr8 | also I wonder what's your opinion about the Librem 5? | 16:48 |
| Kero | gr8: Unfortunately, the project is in hibernation. | 17:02 |
| gr8 | Kero, hmm, ok. Why is that? I thought this is a crowdfunded project? How much money has been raised and what happened with it? | 17:45 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | in short, the crowdfunding never reached the goal. We got only half of the number of preorders needed to reach break-even for economical feasibility. So, doing R&D while waiting for more preorders to come in, we finally reached a dead end. Meanwhile, availability of key parts dwindled and now it's basically no further feasible to follow the original concept | 20:50 |
| gr8 | sorry to hear that Joerg-Neo900. Thanks for explaining | 21:47 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | yw, and sorry | 21:49 |
| gr8 | Joerg-Neo900, I wonder what's your take on the Librem 5? Wouldn't that kinda match the vision that you originally had, being pro-privacy and open source? | 22:37 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | the "open-source" on hw-level is yet to be seen. Purism's other devices have no public hw documentation. The software also doesn't really look to me like 100% open, rather it seems similar to what e.g. Nokia did with N900, shipping *one* firmware that's tailored to fit the hardware but doesn't really encourage independent development of system core parts | 22:42 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | the "privacy" features (hw switch) are very much snake oil since they don't allow an actually meaningful usage pattern | 22:44 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | it's the layman's naive approach to the "my phone spies on me" problem | 22:45 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | I think e.g. the https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator/ is superior in many aspects. In others though it has its own insurmountable deficits | 22:47 |
| gr8 | ah I see your point. It's not quite "hackable" so to say? | 23:04 |
| gr8 | (the Librem) | 23:05 |
| gr8 | yeah clamshell design is pretty dumb for a phone, I wouldn't get such a device as the cosmo | 23:06 |
| gr8 | open source hardware projects are very interesting IMO but they often lack funding, way too often. | 23:07 |
| gr8 | and the technology is progressing very quickly so if you're making an independent piece of hardware it will be totally outdated when being released after a few years of development | 23:08 |
| gr8 | I guess a solution might be a mix & match approach were you can plug in new hardware (e.g. a new processor) into an existing modular platform | 23:10 |
| gr8 | then parts can be replaced with "open source" parts one by one | 23:10 |
| gr8 | like GNU :) | 23:11 |
| gr8 | GNU phone | 23:11 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | Bloks, err Project Ara. A few of us knew from very beginning that it wouldn't ever fly. There are very elementary limitations why it couldn't | 23:15 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | You're right about what you said regarding open source hardware projects. Lack of funding, no availability of competitive new components so you're actually even _starting_ development with obsolete components. Alas there's no solution to that other than finding venture capital (or other funds) which is what all successful phone projects did | 23:22 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | even though they do kickstarter or similar, they already got the funds to present prototypes | 23:23 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | or they simply rebrand an existing device | 23:24 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | which is what e.g. Purism did with their stuff so far, otherwise why would they need to add their "magic" hw switch like a modding project | 23:25 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | also the reason they can't provide schematics etc, they don't hold the copyright aiui | 23:26 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | it's very simple to walk Shenzen 2 weeks and find a laptop manuf who offers a device for rebranding that matches the requirements, sign a contract with them and then apply a silly simple hw switch mod and sell the thing as own equipment with your own company's label on it | 23:29 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | btw Jolla did a quitre similar approach | 23:30 |
| dos1 | Purism's phone isn't a rebranded design, they develop it in house | 23:30 |
| dos1 | they released devkit's design already: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/dvk-mx8m-bsb | 23:31 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | then why do the need to unsolder resistors and solder a wire to the resistor pads for their hw switch? | 23:31 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | yeah, librem5. That's a different story | 23:31 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | sorry, missed the "phone" part in your post :-) | 23:32 |
| dos1 | (devkit is based on EmCraft's module in similar way Neo900 wanted to use BeagleBoard) | 23:32 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | yep | 23:32 |
| gr8 | ok thanks for the insights guys, I'm going to bed, take care! :) | 23:36 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | one nice aspect is the i.MX8 is relatively up-to-date SoC | 23:36 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | the cosmo communicator has a very nice software ecosystem | 23:38 |
| Joerg-Neo900 | to the point where their wiki explains how to dual-boot | 23:39 |
| * Joerg-Neo900 would almist feel tempted to call it "N900 reloaded - this time done right" | 23:40 | |
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