With all the brouhaha surrounding Google’s Android platform, it’s easy to forget that there is another potentially big player in the Linux phone arena.
OpenMoko seems to have been in development for years, but now that the OpenMoko-powered FreeRunner has been releaased, geek news source Ars Techica has taken a closer look at how the underlying OS ticks.
The OS ships with a browser using the WebKit back-end (as seen in the iPhone’s Safari browser) a well-featured media player and calendar plus the usual games and contact manager bits and bobs.
Unusually – and magnificent, in a nailing the colours to the mast kind of way – the phone also comes with a proper command-line terminal for hardcore geekery. You can even place calls using a command line app, if that floats your boat.
Although the OS is admirably open for experimentation and development, Ars is a little concerned that the plethora of APIs and code libraries might come at the cost of performance and consistency compasred to Android’s more tightly-controlled development.
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