Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf]

Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by dogma1138 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @09:50AM (#8806356)

Again i went over most of the schematics and the specifications and nothing actually in this project seems to be worth while. The privacy features are kinda moot and not effective, and the hardware is a joke. Low end SOC(TI DM3730 which is 4-5 years old now) with poor media support and very low performance and only 1GB RAM. Limited RAM and extremely limited ROM/Onboard FLASH which will limit the OS in the long run or force you to use the SSD card which will lead to probably the most common leakage. Oh and the screen? 3.5" TFT, 800x480 resistive, seriously where did they even find a resistive touch screen these days at the bargain bin on Alibaba? And they expect people to pay 850 EURO's for that? So no this is not a modernization of the N900 it's pretty much the N900 with hardware that is only slightly newer than what was available when the N900 came to the market.

There is seriously no reason for this phone to be so poorly designed especially with their mentality of sandbox rather than trust. We had quite a few phone projects that were either designed by the community or by small companies and all of them managed to use top of the line hardware. You have Snapdragon 800/801 phones under 300$ these days, why use a SOC that will not even be able to play a movie these days?

So sadly this isn't the driod you should be looking for, still waiting for a Tizen/Meego phone worth while Samsung has been shipping some in India, and Yatta has a very nicely designed phone out in Europe and Russia but none of them are toolkit phones sadly.

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by remael on Sunday December 28, 2014 @10:12AM (#8806406)

There is still a lively community around the n900, as certain folks love its features. Though it has some drawbacks like only 256MiB RAM, no BT 4.0, no LTE, propper USB OTG, no gyro, no compass.

The point of the neo900 project is to perserve the features of the n900 and gently deminish the drawbacks. It is not about having a octacore and 16GiB of RAM which people using the n900 don't even care about.

For me the most important features of the n[eo]900 are: modem properly seperated from CPU/RAM (not the case for basically any smartphone of today), hardware keyboard, propper linux environment

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by dogma1138 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @10:50AM (#8806472)

I have an N950(bought of ebay) and i care about meego/maemo/tizen/fork of the week... And in general that is nonsense, you've just mentioned the drawbacks of the N900 so why release a device which has the same drawbacks? The SOC was lowend when it came out, and currently you could not find a smartphone with a SOC which even comes near it's performance even if you look at the pre-paid bargain bin at walmart.

We are literally talking about a SOC which will have issues playing a 1080p movie. Why only 1GB RAM(other than the fact that the SOC they've chosen seems to not support more than that)? RAM costs absolutely nothing these days, the modems they've selected is also quite questionable considering it's made by a subsidiary of Gemalto especially for a "privacy" oriented device. And 512MB Flash? this just puts unnecessary limitation on future developments of the Phone, which also means that it will probably not be well supported by the latest Meego forks or any major Linux distribution.

BTW according to their latest schematics i don't see any decent level of separation between the BPP and the SOC not on a hardware level at least, it seems that for the most part they still rely on the software to bring the modem back in line which well is iffy to begin with.

Just based on the hardware they put in the phone there is no reason for it to cost 100 EURO's not to mention 800-900. They've could went with decent hardware and still probably charge as half as much.

P.S. Considering they use a SOC with a PowerVR GPU which uses a closed source linux driver and some other closed source drivers from what it seems i think they should change their tag line to "a mostly free software phone" :) That driver issue alone should make the entirety of the privacy angle moot, it's completely closed and unaudited so for all you know it mirrors your screen so the folks at the NSA can see the porn you watch...

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by seba_dos1 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @11:21AM (#8806556)

The same drawbacks? Let's see:

* "only 256MiB RAM" - Neo900 has 4 times more. * "no BT 4.0" - WG7351-00 has BT 4.0 support. * "no LTE" - you can choose PLS8 modem with LTE. * "no proper USB OTG" - Neo900 has it, plus even internal USB pins for homemade mods. * "no gyro" - Neo900 has one. * "no compass" - Neo900 has one.

512MB flash comes together with RAM package, and it's actually nice to have just for better Maemo/N900 compatibility. There's no reason why you couldn't boot OS from eMMC, which will for sure be at least 32GB. Actually, if you plan to tinker a lot with the phone, I'd recommend having some sort of rescue OS in flash, and your own OS of choice on the first partition of eMMC.

1080p movie may be a bit tough to play on this SoC, right. 720p however should be fine, and I hardly see the point of going 1080p with 800x480 screen.

BPP and SoC are connected only via USB, audio codec and some GPIOs. It's pretty much as separated as it can be - maybe except using serial line instead of USB.

"They've could went with decent hardware and still probably charge as half as much." Of course - if we could produce number of units with a bit more zeros at its end, it would be very cheap. You haven't discovered anything special here - it's just standard economy of scale. With our current scale, any "modern" design would either cost ten times more, or wouldn't be possible to build at all due to lack of available components to buy in such low amounts.

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by dogma1138 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @01:48PM (#8806968)

That would be nice and all if the SOC could allow decent internet browsing experience and MM support. So sorry i don't see how putting out a device with hardware which only slightly better than the original N900. Yeah you'll have BT 4.0, decent WIFI and LTE but then again you won't be able to browse YouTube on that SOC properly. I'm sorry but i really don't see the usefulness of a device with a single core 1Ghz CPU and 1GB ram these days and it's a damn shame, the whole idea behind Meamo/Meego is the freedom to do pretty much everything why put hardware in it that will not allow you to do anything? Heck with that screen even office and text editing will be a bitch :(

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by edwintorok on Sunday December 28, 2014 @10:56AM (#8806487)

Although I would prefer having a phone with an open-source GPU driver, the situation is not too bad with the Neo900: apparently you can run without the non-free blobs as long as you don't need 3D acceleration: http://neo900.org/faq#gfx

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by edwintorok on Sunday December 28, 2014 @10:49AM (#8806470)

See here on why finding a better SoC is hard: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2808

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by dogma1138 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @11:03AM (#8806508)

Please don't compare the OMAP5 to the dm3730. While the OMAP 5 is not the latest and greatest it's still a modern SOC.

We are still talking about a SOC with a dual core CPU, a modern GPU and LPDDR2/DDR3 support. The dm3730 has a weak CPU, supports slow and outdated RAM, and a GPU which will not be able to support modern multimedia.

Also Open Pandora is meant to be a dedicated platform for emulating (very) old games. Not a general purpose modern mobile computing platform. For it's purposes the OMAP5 SOC they've selected is probably an overkill and most of the flak they got for it was from people wanting to use their "console" as a general purpose computing device...

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by edwintorok on Sunday December 28, 2014 @11:29AM (#8806585)

I wonder if Neo900 could have that OMAP5 SoC as an option then for those willing to pay (even) more.

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Re:Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf] by seba_dos1 on Sunday December 28, 2014 @11:39AM (#8806610)

As an option, no. It's too big change, it would basically be a different product. Also, being able to base the design on already working and tested GTA04 was a major point when we evaluated feasibility of the project at its start.

As an upgrade option later - possibly. After all, OpenPandora's Pyra is like our "sister project", sharing some of the developers. Making an OMAP5 upgrade board based on experience and knowledge acquired while working on Pyra shouldn't be that hard.

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