OpenMoko: Surprisingly Stable (Kind Of)

So, I got my OpenMoko Neo Freerunner in the mail a few days ago. At first I thought it was a nightmare. Tonight, when I first sat down and *truly* tinkered with it, I found it was actually a lot more stable and well-developed than I thought.

You see, the issue with it isn't that it suffers from lack of packages, it's that there's very little documentation, and most of the existent documentation is rather outdated.

The community, while it seems to love cranking out programs, isn't so much for advertising them. So, while I'm looking through all of Google trying to find the screen rotate program, it simply already exists in the opkg repository (much like Debian/Ubuntu's apt-get) and is quite simple to use.

Also, looking through it, though I'm not an uber programmer, I can certainly tell I'm going to have wonderful fun programming for this thing -- it's an embedded programmer's wet dream. No, really. Thousands of libraries, compilers on the phone itself... everything but EMACS. (have I found my first porting project? =-O )

P.S. I'm saying it's easy for me to use with a decade of Linux experience. I'm not saying you should run out and buy this to replace your iPhone. Unless you *really* know your way around a Linux command line, you'll be totally lost with this phone.

P.P.S. "opkg install omnewrotate" in case you were wondering. Click the rotate icon on the main menu. Turn it any direction you freaking wish and watch the rotation! (accelerometer-based, like the iPhone) A bit choppy, but not at all bad!!!