OpenMoko Announces Integrated Open Source Mobile Phone

location based services


OpenMoko jas announced the availability of a completely integrated open source mobile communications platform in partnership with FIC, a company who specialises in in motherboards, graphics cards, mobile solutions, and electronic devices. The announcement of the OpenMoko mobile communications platform coincides with the unveiling of FIC’s Neo1973 smartphone, which utilizes the full OpenMoko platform, and promised to be available in January 2007.OpenMoko is based on Linux open source efforts, offering common storage models and libraries for application developers. One of OpenMoko’s goals is the effortless mobile application delivery, facilitated by a software manager that makes it easy to add, remove, and update applications. These applications will be available through feeds including “OpenMoko Certified” as well as other commercial and community sources. The OpenMoko platform is based on OpenEmbedded, giving end-users access to thousands of existing open source applications from the OpenZaurus, Familiar Linux, and Ångström projects as well as many other open source efforts.OpenMoko has partnered with mobile open source software company, Funambol, to provide full push e-mail and PIM synchronization support to all applications running on the OpenMoko platform. The company says with OpenMoko and Funambol, mobile phones will stay in sync with their environment while automatically update themselves as new features are added and bugs are fixed.First International Computer (FIC) has announced that OpenMoko is the platform of choice for their next generation smartphones, and used the platform to develop the Neo1973, the first commercially available smartphone powered by OpenMoko. The Neo1973 comes with a 2.8” VGA touch screen, A-GPS for location and navigation services, support for GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, application manager to install / remove / update applications, push e-mail, contacts, and calendar synchronization plus the OpenMoko Software Development Kit (SDK) for application developmentCellular data will be available through GPRS. The device sports 128MB SDRAM, 64MB NAND flash, and memory can be expanded through a microSD slot.The Neo1973 smartphone, along with OpenMoko, will be internationally available January 2007.