OpenMoko vs iPhone - Free your phone or Fight your phone?
13 January 2008
Hello Everyone, I am rather busy at the moment so I am going to pull out some posts from my drafts folder that I never got around to publishing, so the subjects might be in a rather random order or discuss old issues but you are used to that I'm sure! Let's start with a comparison between the iPhone and the OpenMoko Neo1973-GTA02 FreeRunner.
For more on this topic, you can see my `Smart Phones and Devices`_ series.
The other day someone saw my phone, an old dilapidated Nokia, and wondered why I did not have a smart phone. I explained that the Nokia makes calls quite fine, thankyou, and while I have considered a Symbian phone, I am waiting for the forthcoming OpenMoko phone.
The person then asked why I did not consider an iPhone, is that not the best phone available? I explained that for me, an iPhone was completely out of the question. While I have played with the iPhone for half an hour or so, I am distinctly under-impressed by it.
Anyway, let's get down to business and compare the phones.
Hardware
Both phones have 400Mhz available using Samsung ARM-based processors.
[For those interested in hardware both phones have processors with higher speed chips underclocked to 400Mhz. The iPhone has a 600Mhz chip and the FreeRunner has a 500Mhz chip. Undercloaking is done for a variety of reasons, normally just because you wanted 400Mhz but the cheapest chip was at a different speed. They can't just change the speed of the device as the other components will be designed for and tested at 400Mhz.]
For a phone, 400Mhz is huge, the laptop that I used until a couple of years ago only had 200Mhz. For comparison, the Nokia Internet Tablet has 400Mhz, and the OLPC XO has 433 Mhz (this is an AMD rather than an ARM embedded processor so it has a far bigger cache). Of course, these devices don't have to run phone services so it is not an exact comparison.
Both the FreeRunner and the iPhone have 128MB of RAM. I read that the iPhone uses 11MB for graphics, while I'm not sure what the FreeRunner does, it does have a dedicated graphics chip (coProcessor/ Accelerator) which presumably does something.
My aforementioned laptop had 32MB when new and 64MB when maxed out. I still find it amazing that you can get something so high powered in your pocket. 400Mhz and 128MB RAM in a phone!
The FreeRunner screen (480x640 at 285 ppi) has a higher resolution than the iPhone screen (320x480 at 160 ppi) but the iPhone screen has advanced multi- touch capabilities.
The iPhone has the same proprietary connector that you see on an iPod. You can plug your iPhone into your PC but that is it. The FreeRunner has a Powered Mini-USB port, so you can plug USB devices into it. So theoretically you could plug a printer or a keyboard into the FreeRunner.
The iPhone battery is also like an iPod. If the battery dies then you have to send the phone away to be fixed. The FreeRunner has a removable battery, if you have ever owned a Nokia or whatever then you know how they look. So in theory, one could go travelling with several batteries and swap them out.
Lastly each phone has a couple of things that the other doesn't, the iPhone has a camera, while the FreeRunner has GPS and a microSD slot for removable storage. Since I have a separate and far more powerful camera, the usefulness of the GPS outweighs the camera, but that is up to you.
So on the hardware front, the iPhone and FreeRunner are an even match. The iPhone has a more flashy design while the FreeRunner is more practical and reconfigurable.
The biggest difference on the hardware front is that the iPhone case is designed not to be opened, and if you do find some way to get inside then you void the warranty.
At the other extreme, OpenMoko provides picks and screwdrivers to open the FreeRunner case, and has hardware schematics on the website.
This difference only gets stronger as we move to the software.
Before we move on here is how to open the OpenMoko, and here is how to open the iPhone (flash video). Can you notice the difference?
iPhone - look but don't touch
The iPhone is based on a secret Apple OS and currently has no kind of SDK and no way to put other applications on.
So at the moment, to develop your own stuff for the iPhone, you have to trawl through random forums, misuse the phone restore feature to perform a jailbreak and then carefully dodge the iPhone updates that they don't break your applications or destroy your data.
If I am not root, then I am not buying it
The FreeRunner's Operating System, OpenMoko, is Linux.
Not a Linux kernel plus some crappy proprietary userspace, it is Linux with a proper X server, GTK, Matchbox, dbus, ssh, ALSA. In short, it is a proper Linux distribution like you would have on your desktop, just with special menus and a few new libraries (i.e. so you can make calls and make text messages). It even has an apt-get style package manager.
While some applications will not make sense due to the phone form factor and the small screen, in theory almost any Linux application can be made to work on the FreeRunner.
The other Linux-based phones seem to just allow you to run applications within the Java sandbox alone. The FreeRunner allows you to have applications in whatever language or toolkit you want, as you can load the dependencies on there yourself. Worried about space? Just get another microSD card.
The only other phone platform that comes close in openness and configurability is Nokia's Symbian, and OpenMoko blows that completely out of the water.
With FreeRunner, there is a provided mechanism to obtain the root password of your phone, then you can treat like any other Linux system. Instructions are provided at the OpenMoko homepage at every point.
Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion. (Mike Coleman)
The slogan of OpenMoko is 'Free your phone', in the same vein, we could say that the slogan of the iPhone should be 'fight your phone'. This for me sums up why I won't buy an iPhone but I will happily wait for the OpenMoko.
1 schischa says...
thx, I didn't know that the hardware was so much alike
Posted at 3:05 p.m. on January 13, 2008
2 David Jones says...
Reading between the lines it seems that only one of the two phones can make a phone call.
Posted at 5:42 p.m. on January 14, 2008
3 Zeth says...
@David, reading through what lines? The FreeRunner phone is not out until late spring at the earliest, so no you can't make a call with a phone that is not out.
Posted at 6:20 p.m. on January 14, 2008
4 Cor says...
Rather interesting you didn't mention the Nokia N95, I know, it's Symbian 60 based, but the features are truly amazing. I happen to own a N95 since I wasn't sure on when the OpenMoko phone would ever be released, and when it does how stable it would turn out to be.
The N95 is I think by far the best "phone" available, if you see what the guys @ Nokia managed to put into such a relative small device. 5 Mpixel camera, miniSD, GPS and an accelerometer. I'm truly stunned by the N95, the only downside is S60 if you ask me. Completely OpenSource like the OpenMoko is of course the ultimate goal but at what cost compared to the N95.
I'm really looking forward to see the OpenMoko project going on for real, and what the first real end-user experiences will be. So far I'm glad with Gentoo on my Thinkpad X41, who knows in a few years or so it'll be running on my phone too. But that's up to how to OpenMoko project turns out.
By the way, have you received the latest Gentoo news lately? Some big issues over there! Hope they'll work it out, I'd be lost without Gentoo, my "Demanding Blonde", as someone used to call it ;)
Posted at 12:14 a.m. on January 15, 2008
5 David Jones says...
@Zeth: I was mostly referring to the developer version. I just got the impression from the OpenMoko site that they were being a bit coy about what capabilities the developer version of the 'phone had.
For example: "If you are a Developer, jump in, the water's fine.", and "The Neo Base kit contains everything the mobile application developer needs to enjoy the benefits of the first freed phone, the Neo 1973".
Posted at 8:31 a.m. on January 15, 2008
6 Justin says...
A phone with a 400MHz clock speed and 128MBs of ram is pretty impresive. It wasn't too long ago that I was using a 386-66 with 16MBs of ram.
Posted at 1:59 a.m. on January 20, 2008
7 NEUR0M4NCER says...
My XDA Exec (HTC Universal) has something ridiculous like a 533mhz processor, yet winCE still seems to find a way to slow it down to a point when it feels like i'm running Vista on my old AMD K6-2 333mhz Desktop...
On the other hand, i've also tried the test version of OpenMoko on the Exec - I was hoping for big things, but it still runs slow (ten times better looking, and way more intuitive, mind), with a good many essential functions missing (not having a go at the super-smart people who have worked their behinds off to get it going in the first place though). I too am waiting for the official OpenMoko release, handset preferably, but a fully working OS will do.
Since switching to Ubuntu Linux last year, I feel i've seen the way forward, and can't wait for a similar community to spring up around the OpenMoko handset - finally, a contender in the rubbish 'rock paper scissors' competition going on in the 'convergence device' market at the moment.
Posted at 11:55 a.m. on March 23, 2008