BLUG Openmoko Meet
After the Mark Shuttleworth’s talk at Y! Office (or was it the Fedora Guy’s talk??) I had gone to the BLUG Meet yesterday. So what was special?? Yes, it was the Openmoko core guys Harald Welte and Sean speaking on the Open Mobile Kommunications Platform or in short the OpenMoko Project.
The room was filled with about 100 people or may be even less by around 1600 hrs and Tejas welcomed the audience and introduced the speakers (did they really need an intro???) Sean started off with how he got this whole idea of developing a Open Phone and the difficulties faced in convincing the FIC Management to go and support this project. Then Harald Welte took over and started speaking about the more interesting aspects of the phone. Yes, the technical details. An interesting piece of software is the “devirginator” which will enable you to completely reflash the entire phone right from the firmware. The Neo1973 phone comprises of two proprietary blocks apart from the completely Free and Open Applications Processor. One is the GSM Module (the application processor can communicate using standard AT commands to this chip) and the other is the AGPS module. Apart from these two every piece of “substance” that goes into the phone is Free and Open. Harald gave a live demo of Dialing and Incoming call and also the UI as such in general. Snacks were served and everything wound up by around 1930 hrs. I met up with empty_mind, kushal, shres, t3 and my long lost friend “Manager” Mahendra 
I had discussions with Sean regarding setting up Labs in Universities with OpenMoko providing the platform. Some of the Indian Universities should think about this as Sean is already thinking on a win-win cost model for Universities (especially in India). Great Learning opportunity in Hands University guys!! Make use of it.
It was a lot of fun. Photo set here
April 19th, 2007 at 10:06 am
This Lab stuff is interesting, Any updates on that .were i cam contact this guy