Living with the Freerunner

I’ve had the Freerunner for about a month now. It’s pretty sweet, but I don’t get very many calls anyway, so it’s hard to judge what it would be like for someone who is constantly on the phone.

John, my manager, also has a Freerunner. He spends a fair bit of time on the phone, and seems to be reasonably happy.

The obvious pros and cons of the phone, as a day to day device so far are:

• Pro — it’s a free software phone in rapid development.
• Con — it’s in rapid development.
• Pro — you can change the battery easily.
• Con — you have to change the battery fairly regularly.
• Pro — you can SSH into your phone to put stuff on it.
• Con — you have to SSH into your phone to stuff on it.
• Pro — there are five distributions for it.
• Con — there are five distributions on it, but none of the work as well as one really good distribution could.

Sending text messages is a little slow, and the lack of tactile feedback is a little annoying. In the first version of the software Om2007, the phone would make a reassuring click when you touched it. This has gone, sadly.

With Qtopia, I found that SMS messages were unreliable in delivery times. I am now trying the FSO (Freesmartphone.org) distribution to see if that works.

One thing I look forward to, is the ability to write some simple games for the phone. Unfortunately, Qtopia doesn’t use X11 or something, so writing applications involves learning C++ and Qt, which er.. yeah.

One thing I like is how easy it is to install new software on many of the distributions. One thing that worries me is the number of kernel updates. However, I am now very skilled at upgrading and reflashing phones, and the fact that the phone uses standard USB cables is reassuring.

Overall, I am happy with the way the phone is going. Soon, it will be much better, and eventually will beat the proprietary phones in terms of software quality, but it already beats them in many other ways.