I believe what you term the Motorola "Dext" is being offered here in the US as the "Cliq" again, exclusively by T-Mobile. It's available for pre-sale here in about a week on their website and has had great reviews.
Gallery: 10 best open source mobiles
by Andy Smith | October 13, 2009 7:16am PDT | Image 1 of 11
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Smartphones have come a long way in the last few years. Not so long ago, a smartphone all too often meant a cumbersome PDA-style brick running an equally cumbersome operating system, or else a Qwerty-sporting BlackBerry tucked discretely inside a businessperson's briefcase.
How times have changed.
?Nowadays smartphones are more likely to resemble shiny touchscreen toys and their OS has never been so important.
To serve a very demanding consumer audience and to attract all-important developers, smartphone makers are increasingly opting for an open source operating system. More than 60 per cent of the smartphone market now uses an open source OS, according to analyst house Juniper Research, which has noted a significant shift from proprietary to open source.
Google, for example, cooked up its Android mobile OS platform to be open from the start.?
However, Android wasn't the first mobile Linux effort by any means: work on open source mobiles by the LiMo Foundation, as well as the Openmoko project was already underway by the time the Google OS was announced.
Symbian is also in on the open source act, after its Symbian Ltd incarnation evolved into the open source Symbian Foundation and started the process of setting the Symbian OS free.
With Juniper Research predicting smartphones shipped with an open source OS will increase from 106 million this year to 223 million by 2014, the wind is well and truly in open source's sails.
In the meantime, you might be wondering what handsets are out there already - and to give you a flavor of open source mobiles Natasha Lomas of silicon.com has rounded up some of the best devices to date over the next 10 pages...
Credit: HTC
Talkback Most Recent of 5 Talkback(s)
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ocbizjournal16th Oct 2009 -
Open Source Phone
What I need in a smartphone:
800 x 480 display minimum
500 mhz cpu minimum
256 meg ram available
8+ gig removable storage (SDCard)
decent audio
Sprint compatibility
real Linux with a free SDK with which I can program the device in C++.
I'm not interested in Android because end-user development is all in Java.
Or I want a minimal candybar cell phone with great connectivity and a separate UMPC I can tether to it, such as the OpenPandora.
hiraghm@...16th Oct 2009 -
Yes! Great definition of an open source cellphone
My additions:
GSM instead of "Sprint" for world-wide compatibility.
Unlockable.
Touchscreen and chicklet keyboard.
Completely open-source including all drivers.
gmeader16th Oct 2009 -
Java Apps are the Future!
You won't see the best apps being written in much other than Java soon. It's the most secure as the apps are sandboxed away from doing damage to the OS. It is also very efficient and allows simple multiple applications to run at the same time w/o interfering with each other, like an Object based Operating system. Like it or not Java style OS's are here to stay.
Sorry to say, you are in the throw back mentality that's in it's death throws and you might as well start designing your own operating system and phone!
For banking and security, it's now in the clouds with secure java OS on the Linux kernel!
The reason? Simple.... I can design a Java app that'll run on any hardware or operating system or platform. If I'm a developer, don't you think I want to make more money by not being sucked into niche markets like you describe? Open Source is the wave, but it's Java riding it in for the cash on the beach!
i2fun@...17th Oct 2009 -
Maemo
You need maemo. Look at N900. There is also the Openmoko, but it doesn't have good support and
promotion unfortunately
gerstavros20th Oct 2009
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
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