Community Updates

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Even though Openmoko strives to keep the community informed of the development progress, OpenMoko does not provide delivery dates. Instead, Openmoko reports the project status here and on the openmoko-community mailing list. Major updates are also sent to the announce mailing list.

The status is usually updated at least twice a month, usually by Michael Shiloh.

Interested developers may additionally wish to follow the progress on the openmoko-kernel mailing list.

You are invited to add questions or topics you think should be included in the Community Updates by emailing community@lists.openmoko.org or by editing section 2 of this wiki page.

The latest Community Update was posted to the community mailing list on April 11, 2008 FreeRunner Pricing and PVT update.

Steve says: May 4, 2008 

The last Pre MP is done and mass production is slated to start on may 9.


Phones will start rolling off the lines, they will go through test, They
will be shipped to distribution.

When the Phones hit the dock and are ready to ship, I'll do a press release
and announce to the list and the store will open. 

So you have 3 steps: build phone. test phone. ship phone.

Then we take orders. I was very adamament about having phones in the disty
ready to ship before I opened the web shop.

Also, I need to update everybody on software. 

Sorry for the short response, but those are the facts as I have them

Steve says: May 4, 2008 

Minor correction, After we complete the test on the Pre MP, if we hit the
Yeild numbers required, we start MP on the 9th at the earliest!. So, I'd put
the window at May 9 to may 16th. Just to be accurate.

Steve says: 

I thought I would combine a couple posts today. First an update on PVT, or
production verification test. Phones are being sent to me from the first PVT
run. Michael Shiloh will be back in Silicon valley next Tuesday, so he and I
will test the samples and get them out to key partners. I want to check a
couple things like using the Nokia batteries as spares and generic USB
chargers before I send these samples out. 

Now, for the update on Products, and Pricing,   

1. Products.

Orginally the FreeRunner ( GTA02) was planned to come out in two packages.
Basic and advanced, just like the Neo 1973. We killed that idea. It was a
quick humane death. The problem was the GTA02 advanced unit would have been
$650 USD. After seeing the response to Neo 1973, a huge response, we decided
the best path was to lower the price, reward our early developers, and
attract more developers. 

2. Pricing
We scrubbed the BOM ( bill of materials). We eliminated the Luxurious bits.
Optimized the box like it was code. The first thing we got rid of
was the lunchbox. It was cool, but it was expensive and heavy. Eliminating
that was a sizeable cost savings. ( think shipping weight). 

Next we pulled out the debug board and made it a separate product.  We
priced it at $99 US. about 1 tenth what people would pay for similar
capability.

My goal was to get to a place where we could sell the FreeRunner at $399.
USD.

We did that.

The FreeRunner will ship from Openmoko.com at $399. For early customers
I'm looking at throwing in a few free things. More details later.

The debug board will be available as a separate product for $99 USD.

Many people wrote me mails asking if they could get a discount by buying
more than one phone. Sometimes they were universities, sometimes a small
business, sometimes a small group or club. 

For these people we created a 10Pack. instead of 399 per phone, we will
charge 369 per phone.

 
Over the next few days I will explain the next steps we go through and how
the product will get distributed


Steve

See also April 14, 2008 next costumers location.

Steve says: 

That will be the subject of my next post. It's somewhat complicated
With a host of side issues. I look at it like debugging code. I try to fix
One issue at a time. Then test my fix. Then move onto the next problem and fix that.
So, We had to prioritize issues.

First: get a good product line up, simplify the product line, address the key concerns
DRIVE THE PRICE DOWN, and involve more developers.

  A. We killed the orange colored phone. May it rest in peace.  
  B. We got rid of the base versus advanced. We have One Product. With developers goodies offered on the side.
  C. We are in the process ( working hard) to take excessive stuff out of the box. 
  D. We are working to make all accessories "non custom" products. 

Second: Work the logistics of getting products to people. This process is as hard as building  phones.
Trust me. For Neo 1973 we utilized one distributon center. FICA in the USA. Our goal is to add  A HUB
In Europe.  The thought was this. Shipping to a HUB in Europe and then having that HUB service Europe
Would be CHEAPER than shipping to the US and having the US serve Europe. Seemed logical. That was    wrong.

So. I'm going to Finish the first goal. Get the line up solid. Start shipping that lineup. Then
I will go optimize the distribution question.

I'll have more to say about this, but for now, I'm just waiting to get my samples.

PVTs are looking good. I'll let you know what Michael and I think when we see them.

Then I'l have an update on Software. Many things to talk about there.


See below for a list of previous updates.


Contents

Discussion of current issues

GTA02 hardware design and test

The information below has been collected from various sources, feel free to add questions and comments here.

While writing a device driver for the new battery which provides an accurate counter of the charge state of the GTA02, the driver developer discovered that the device driver does not get a reading of the charge state due to a very long response time with only one I/O signal when trying to read the charge state. To be able to read the battery status properly, it has been written that it will be necessary to re-design that part of the GTA02 for hardware version GTA02A5 to use two I/O signals to reduce the response time (one for transmitting commands, one for receiving data?). Bug 957 may have more information.

12/06/2007 - GTA02a5 is a minor variation from GTA02a4, so it shouldn't take very long. We are waiting for confirmation of Wifi and a few other parts of the GTA02a4 hardware before we manufacture even a small test run of GTA02a5.

01/30/2008 - A small number of GTA02A5 have been made and are now being tested. Since much of the hardware is being verified by kernel and driver code, an excellent place to monitor this is on the openmoko-kernel mailing list.

03/18/2008 - The Freerunner design is currently staged to go through Production Validation Test (PVT). The hardware design A5 is, we believe, solid. We are updating this design to A6 to maximize production yields.

The purpose of PVT is to make sure the yield is high enough, and to make sure the manufacturing and testing process is smooth and efficient.

gllin GPS driver for GTA01

11/29/2007 - Thanks to a tremendous amount of hard work by many people, we have ready a release of gllin, the GPS driver. Instructions at [1] or grab the ipk directly from [2].

850 MHz band not supported in USA+Canada (e.g. comment 24 on bug #256)

The GSM chip set is capable of quad band operation but the circuit implemented in GTA02 only supports 3 bands. Currently GTA02 supports only 900/1800/1900MHz.

11/29/2007 - We would like to offer an 850/1800/1900MHz version of GTA02 for areas that need it. We are looking into whether this is feasible or not. This requires a number of changes (components, firwmare, calibration, etc.) and so is uncertain until we test it.

12/09/2007 - Since the GSM section is essentially the same between GTA01 and GTA02, we thought a good experiment would be to modify a couple GTA01 handsets for 850MHz and to test them out here in the USA.

12/20/2007 - Due to the enthusiastic response I received to my request for testing volunteers I've asked our hardware group to modify a few more phones. I don't know when, or even if, they will be able to do this. Meanwhile, I'll be sending out the units I have to the testers, along with a simple test plan.

We have no intention of manufacturing 850MHz GTA01s, nor can we modify user's phones this way. We modified a couple of units ONLY so that we could test the circuit that we might use in GTA02. When the experiment is done, these modified units must be returned to OpenMoko.

Conversion of GTA02 to quad band would require major changes and so will not happen.

Delivery of a GSM firmware update for the 3G SIM bug (#666)

Background:

A bug in the GSM firmware prevents some USA 3G SIM cards from working properly. The bug has been fixed, but since the GSM module is under extremely tight legal protection, it is not clear whether or how we can allow customers to perform this upgrade themselves.

12/09/2007 - We've been informed that everything legal has been agreed upon by all parties regarding the process that would allow you to upgrade your own GSM firmware. All that remains is to get everything signed. Apparently the process of getting things signed takes a few weeks!

12/20/2007 - Meanwhile, we have resolved the difficulties I was having performing the upgrade, and I am now able to upgrade your handsets. Anyone interested in having me do this should contact me at michael@openmoko.org.

Questions or Topics you think are missing

Touch screen & the screen itself

What about talking with the touch screen? There doesn't seem to be any kind of proximity sensor to feel the presence of ear + cheek to disable the touch screen, so error presses can be an issue. I feel the need to both be able to talk with the phone on my ear and still be able to use the programs while calling so simply disabling touch screen while talking can't be a possibility. I've heard multiple possibilities to remedy this with shaking the phone to enable/disable touch screen and et cetera, but none of them have been easy enough for everyday use. It has to work seamlessly.

Also, some of the photos I've seen of the device have shown a significant amount of glare in the screen. Will the screen be usable at all outdoors in sunny weather? There should be an anti-glare & anti-scratch coating on the screen. The useability of the screen especially when it's the only UI for using the device is fundamental and IMO its importance goes beyond almost all other features. If one can't see what's on the screen for half of the time and has to cover it with hands or go into shade in order to be able to use the phone, what good is it? Has anyone made a study on the screen yet? http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GTA02_Hardware#Display

SMedia 3362 Documentation & OpenGL ES Drivers

There is an open source kdrive driver being written for the GTA02 which will use hardware to accelerate the XRender extension. While the chip is capable of 3D graphics, no OpenGL ES driver/library is avaliable and OpenMoko developers will not be writing one in the near future (although they have not ruled it out in the long-term).

Documentation for the SMedia 3362 has been promised (see this post). However, this refers to documentation OpenMoko developers will be writing themselves, not the technical documentation SMedia have provided OpenMoko with. The OpenMoko developers had to sign an NDA with SMedia to obtain this documentation and are therefore unable to pass this information on to community developers. (See this post for details)

Power Management on the Neo1973

It is still not clear if it will be possible to have "reasonable" battery life on the Neo1973 (GTA1) hardware or if there are hardware problems that make this impossible.(see this post). Can this be officially clarified?

Further questions and comments regarding this by a GTA01 Neo owner:

This is the single most important issue keeping european users (not affected by the 850MHz issues) from using the neo as a regular phone. After reading in various places (IRC, Lists, this Wiki), it seems like this issue divides into several ones and a more detailed answer would be helpful for each:

  • if it's a bug in the firmware failing to trigger an IRQ, is at least the kernel sufficiently prepared to wake up?
  • there are rumours that a wrong resistor value on the GTA01 board yields a very high quiescient current for the GSM in suspend mode. Is there any further information on this (what's the battery life in proper suspend with and without this fix) and maybe a short document describing a fix available? Is it doable at home (replacing a 0402 surely counts as doable!)
  • what is the status of failed resumes after a suspend?

Another vote for power management, Neo is practically useless with all the configurability and features if it needs to be plugged on a charger every day. I'm expecting more from Neo in terms of power management and battery life time than from for example E90 which is packed with many hw and sw features. I hope the hardware is re-checked so that these kind of errors in the design (unreasonably high currents etc) get worked out.

Previous Community Updates

Retrieved from "http://openmoko.org/index.php?title=Community_Updates&oldid=30773"
Personal tools

Even though Openmoko strives to keep the community informed of the development progress, OpenMoko does not provide delivery dates. Instead, Openmoko reports the project status here and on the openmoko-community mailing list. Major updates are also sent to the announce mailing list.

The status is usually updated at least twice a month, usually by Michael Shiloh.

Interested developers may additionally wish to follow the progress on the openmoko-kernel mailing list.

You are invited to add questions or topics you think should be included in the Community Updates by emailing community@lists.openmoko.org or by editing section 2 of this wiki page.

The latest Community Update was posted to the community mailing list on April 11, 2008 FreeRunner Pricing and PVT update.

Steve says: May 4, 2008 

The last Pre MP is done and mass production is slated to start on may 9.


Phones will start rolling off the lines, they will go through test, They
will be shipped to distribution.

When the Phones hit the dock and are ready to ship, I'll do a press release
and announce to the list and the store will open. 

So you have 3 steps: build phone. test phone. ship phone.

Then we take orders. I was very adamament about having phones in the disty
ready to ship before I opened the web shop.

Also, I need to update everybody on software. 

Sorry for the short response, but those are the facts as I have them

Steve says: May 4, 2008 

Minor correction, After we complete the test on the Pre MP, if we hit the
Yeild numbers required, we start MP on the 9th at the earliest!. So, I'd put
the window at May 9 to may 16th. Just to be accurate.

Steve says: 

I thought I would combine a couple posts today. First an update on PVT, or
production verification test. Phones are being sent to me from the first PVT
run. Michael Shiloh will be back in Silicon valley next Tuesday, so he and I
will test the samples and get them out to key partners. I want to check a
couple things like using the Nokia batteries as spares and generic USB
chargers before I send these samples out. 

Now, for the update on Products, and Pricing,   

1. Products.

Orginally the FreeRunner ( GTA02) was planned to come out in two packages.
Basic and advanced, just like the Neo 1973. We killed that idea. It was a
quick humane death. The problem was the GTA02 advanced unit would have been
$650 USD. After seeing the response to Neo 1973, a huge response, we decided
the best path was to lower the price, reward our early developers, and
attract more developers. 

2. Pricing
We scrubbed the BOM ( bill of materials). We eliminated the Luxurious bits.
Optimized the box like it was code. The first thing we got rid of
was the lunchbox. It was cool, but it was expensive and heavy. Eliminating
that was a sizeable cost savings. ( think shipping weight). 

Next we pulled out the debug board and made it a separate product.  We
priced it at $99 US. about 1 tenth what people would pay for similar
capability.

My goal was to get to a place where we could sell the FreeRunner at $399.
USD.

We did that.

The FreeRunner will ship from Openmoko.com at $399. For early customers
I'm looking at throwing in a few free things. More details later.

The debug board will be available as a separate product for $99 USD.

Many people wrote me mails asking if they could get a discount by buying
more than one phone. Sometimes they were universities, sometimes a small
business, sometimes a small group or club. 

For these people we created a 10Pack. instead of 399 per phone, we will
charge 369 per phone.

 
Over the next few days I will explain the next steps we go through and how
the product will get distributed


Steve

See also April 14, 2008 next costumers location.

Steve says: 

That will be the subject of my next post. It's somewhat complicated
With a host of side issues. I look at it like debugging code. I try to fix
One issue at a time. Then test my fix. Then move onto the next problem and fix that.
So, We had to prioritize issues.

First: get a good product line up, simplify the product line, address the key concerns
DRIVE THE PRICE DOWN, and involve more developers.

  A. We killed the orange colored phone. May it rest in peace.  
  B. We got rid of the base versus advanced. We have One Product. With developers goodies offered on the side.
  C. We are in the process ( working hard) to take excessive stuff out of the box. 
  D. We are working to make all accessories "non custom" products. 

Second: Work the logistics of getting products to people. This process is as hard as building  phones.
Trust me. For Neo 1973 we utilized one distributon center. FICA in the USA. Our goal is to add  A HUB
In Europe.  The thought was this. Shipping to a HUB in Europe and then having that HUB service Europe
Would be CHEAPER than shipping to the US and having the US serve Europe. Seemed logical. That was    wrong.

So. I'm going to Finish the first goal. Get the line up solid. Start shipping that lineup. Then
I will go optimize the distribution question.

I'll have more to say about this, but for now, I'm just waiting to get my samples.

PVTs are looking good. I'll let you know what Michael and I think when we see them.

Then I'l have an update on Software. Many things to talk about there.


See below for a list of previous updates.


Discussion of current issues

GTA02 hardware design and test

The information below has been collected from various sources, feel free to add questions and comments here.

While writing a device driver for the new battery which provides an accurate counter of the charge state of the GTA02, the driver developer discovered that the device driver does not get a reading of the charge state due to a very long response time with only one I/O signal when trying to read the charge state. To be able to read the battery status properly, it has been written that it will be necessary to re-design that part of the GTA02 for hardware version GTA02A5 to use two I/O signals to reduce the response time (one for transmitting commands, one for receiving data?). Bug 957 may have more information.

12/06/2007 - GTA02a5 is a minor variation from GTA02a4, so it shouldn't take very long. We are waiting for confirmation of Wifi and a few other parts of the GTA02a4 hardware before we manufacture even a small test run of GTA02a5.

01/30/2008 - A small number of GTA02A5 have been made and are now being tested. Since much of the hardware is being verified by kernel and driver code, an excellent place to monitor this is on the openmoko-kernel mailing list.

03/18/2008 - The Freerunner design is currently staged to go through Production Validation Test (PVT). The hardware design A5 is, we believe, solid. We are updating this design to A6 to maximize production yields.

The purpose of PVT is to make sure the yield is high enough, and to make sure the manufacturing and testing process is smooth and efficient.

gllin GPS driver for GTA01

11/29/2007 - Thanks to a tremendous amount of hard work by many people, we have ready a release of gllin, the GPS driver. Instructions at [1] or grab the ipk directly from [2].

850 MHz band not supported in USA+Canada (e.g. comment 24 on bug #256)

The GSM chip set is capable of quad band operation but the circuit implemented in GTA02 only supports 3 bands. Currently GTA02 supports only 900/1800/1900MHz.

11/29/2007 - We would like to offer an 850/1800/1900MHz version of GTA02 for areas that need it. We are looking into whether this is feasible or not. This requires a number of changes (components, firwmare, calibration, etc.) and so is uncertain until we test it.

12/09/2007 - Since the GSM section is essentially the same between GTA01 and GTA02, we thought a good experiment would be to modify a couple GTA01 handsets for 850MHz and to test them out here in the USA.

12/20/2007 - Due to the enthusiastic response I received to my request for testing volunteers I've asked our hardware group to modify a few more phones. I don't know when, or even if, they will be able to do this. Meanwhile, I'll be sending out the units I have to the testers, along with a simple test plan.

We have no intention of manufacturing 850MHz GTA01s, nor can we modify user's phones this way. We modified a couple of units ONLY so that we could test the circuit that we might use in GTA02. When the experiment is done, these modified units must be returned to OpenMoko.

Conversion of GTA02 to quad band would require major changes and so will not happen.

Delivery of a GSM firmware update for the 3G SIM bug (#666)

Background:

A bug in the GSM firmware prevents some USA 3G SIM cards from working properly. The bug has been fixed, but since the GSM module is under extremely tight legal protection, it is not clear whether or how we can allow customers to perform this upgrade themselves.

12/09/2007 - We've been informed that everything legal has been agreed upon by all parties regarding the process that would allow you to upgrade your own GSM firmware. All that remains is to get everything signed. Apparently the process of getting things signed takes a few weeks!

12/20/2007 - Meanwhile, we have resolved the difficulties I was having performing the upgrade, and I am now able to upgrade your handsets. Anyone interested in having me do this should contact me at michael@openmoko.org.

Questions or Topics you think are missing

Touch screen & the screen itself

What about talking with the touch screen? There doesn't seem to be any kind of proximity sensor to feel the presence of ear + cheek to disable the touch screen, so error presses can be an issue. I feel the need to both be able to talk with the phone on my ear and still be able to use the programs while calling so simply disabling touch screen while talking can't be a possibility. I've heard multiple possibilities to remedy this with shaking the phone to enable/disable touch screen and et cetera, but none of them have been easy enough for everyday use. It has to work seamlessly.

Also, some of the photos I've seen of the device have shown a significant amount of glare in the screen. Will the screen be usable at all outdoors in sunny weather? There should be an anti-glare & anti-scratch coating on the screen. The useability of the screen especially when it's the only UI for using the device is fundamental and IMO its importance goes beyond almost all other features. If one can't see what's on the screen for half of the time and has to cover it with hands or go into shade in order to be able to use the phone, what good is it? Has anyone made a study on the screen yet? http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GTA02_Hardware#Display

SMedia 3362 Documentation & OpenGL ES Drivers

There is an open source kdrive driver being written for the GTA02 which will use hardware to accelerate the XRender extension. While the chip is capable of 3D graphics, no OpenGL ES driver/library is avaliable and OpenMoko developers will not be writing one in the near future (although they have not ruled it out in the long-term).

Documentation for the SMedia 3362 has been promised (see this post). However, this refers to documentation OpenMoko developers will be writing themselves, not the technical documentation SMedia have provided OpenMoko with. The OpenMoko developers had to sign an NDA with SMedia to obtain this documentation and are therefore unable to pass this information on to community developers. (See this post for details)

Power Management on the Neo1973

It is still not clear if it will be possible to have "reasonable" battery life on the Neo1973 (GTA1) hardware or if there are hardware problems that make this impossible.(see this post). Can this be officially clarified?

Further questions and comments regarding this by a GTA01 Neo owner:

This is the single most important issue keeping european users (not affected by the 850MHz issues) from using the neo as a regular phone. After reading in various places (IRC, Lists, this Wiki), it seems like this issue divides into several ones and a more detailed answer would be helpful for each:

  • if it's a bug in the firmware failing to trigger an IRQ, is at least the kernel sufficiently prepared to wake up?
  • there are rumours that a wrong resistor value on the GTA01 board yields a very high quiescient current for the GSM in suspend mode. Is there any further information on this (what's the battery life in proper suspend with and without this fix) and maybe a short document describing a fix available? Is it doable at home (replacing a 0402 surely counts as doable!)
  • what is the status of failed resumes after a suspend?

Another vote for power management, Neo is practically useless with all the configurability and features if it needs to be plugged on a charger every day. I'm expecting more from Neo in terms of power management and battery life time than from for example E90 which is packed with many hw and sw features. I hope the hardware is re-checked so that these kind of errors in the design (unreasonably high currents etc) get worked out.

Previous Community Updates