You are completely right in your expectation that we share. We would
be happier if we could offer a motherboard replacement for the
Freerunner. With OMAP and UMTS. But as Werner has already found out in
the GTA02-core project this is still very far from becoming reality.
The complexity is balancing circuit design with availability and cost
of chips, and pcb layout with production processes.
Nevertheless, the great open source mobile phone software developed by
this community (SHR, QtMoko, FSO etc.) needs to have modern open and
documented hardware to keep pace with pretededly-open platforms like
iPhone, WebOS, etc. Therefore, this Openmoko Beagle Hybrid board gives
us a tool to develop mobile applications with state of the art
performance (except form factor).
We, a small team of hardware developers, will continue to work on
integrating everything better - but this is a long way to go. I am
sure we will finally succeed because we have decided to do so, but I
don't know when.
So it is better to have something suboptimal than nothing...
Nikolaus
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