2022-03-26

Bye bye, openmoko!

Someone has responded to my message, that I would give away my trusty openmoko neo --- I have changed technology for the last duty it had until recently. And I am happy that someone else is interested to keep it for a little longer.

I do not remember exactly, when I bought this interesting piece of technology, probably in 2009. If memory serves me well, the term "smart phone" was not in wide spread use, at least not near me. Its creators had peculiar ideas about this thing, such as:

the GUI interface would be programmed in Phython and be much simpler to hack on

the phone is accessible over the usb-cable, which exposes a network interface as well

all openmoko phones should form a WLAN mesh network throughout town

It was my first pocket computer with telephone and navigation capabilities. And I had rather high hopes to better organize my contacts, notes, calender and what not. While this was certainly possible, I did not use it enough to better organize anything. I quickly removed the battery and booted it up only, when I needed it, mostly for voice and SMS, and sometimes for navigation. This did not change after I upgraded the gta02 to the gta04 mother board (by Golden Delicious Computers). Did you ever have a phone, where you could upgrade the main board? Not very many such devices ever existed. I will happily admit that after this upgrade the phone was really nice to use.

I switched to a fairphone2 a few years ago, again with high hopes for my personal organization. But let's face it: the gadget will not organize my life, I have to do it myself. So while navigation got a bit simpler due to the much larger screen, not much changed. The fairphone2 broke, the desired part was not available any more, so I gave it away for parts. Since then I'm back to a retro Samsung flip phone. Not so much for the retro design but just because I do not need more functions.

So before I pack it up for shipping I made a farewell picture. Did you ever have a phone, all laced up to be pulled from remote corners of you bag?

Image (1MB)

Farewell!

~ew

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