Absolutely painful. Dear god.

oh dear.

Could be worse, it's similar to pre-HTC Touch windows mobile devices bezel and keyboard-wise. The latter can be fixed through a firmware update I hope, same for scrolling.

The menu's awkward indeed(ui, behaviour and button), about the dpi statement, you don't need it to have a functional keyboard, really, you need it for other things, but not typing(neither you need multi-touch for it). They could've used a simple, standard, T9 keyboard instead of trying to copy winmo down to the invoke keyboard button.

scrolling: iphone gone very wrong
keyboard: winmo default keyboard gone wrong(not that the original much better)
app menu: uiq/palm(looked like you had to switch app category)

btw: check it out how long it took him to type gizmodo.com with the iPhone keyboard : vimeo.com/1318520 , same happened to me, HTC's T9 is still easier to use( you may not be familiar with it and it's hard to find on the web these days, just think of a 9-key mobile phone keyboard with predictive [more recent versions - post htc touch - are also context-based, but everything else is worse] text input, keys bigger than the ones from iphone's keyboard and multi-language support, equally easy to type with 1 or both hands ).

Someone has gotten money (and continues to get it?) to develop this? Terrible and a sad waste.

wow. that's just horrible.

Luis Abreu: "Check it out how long it took him to type gizmodo.com with the iPhone keyboard : vimeo.com/1318520 , same happened to me, HTC's T9 is still easier to use"

I clocked the video at about 41 seconds to type gizmodo.com, I whipped out my iPhone and tried it, I completed it in about 11 seconds, so I could probly type it 3 or 4x in the same time it took him to do it once.

My guess is he'd never used an iPhone before and hadn't had any practice with the keyboard. It's hard to make a comparison of how good or bad a keyboard is from some video without any context: does the person have experience with the device/keyboard? How much?

I can't compare the iPhone with the HTC T9, I have never used one.

I did the test a 2nd time, it took me 6 seconds. If you type something a lot, you'll get very fast on the iPhone.

Trust me.

Holy shit that is disastrous.

That was GREAT! More of the same, please.

OMG look at the size of those keyboard keys. Are they insane?!

@ Fredrik

You can't be serious. By the looks of things the UI is so bad on the Freerunner that you can't do *anything* with it.

great, the Apple "nut cuppers " have penetrated Vimeo. Yes I'm a Mac user but why don't you all gather in a coffee shop in Cupertino and massage warm olive oil into one another and stay off the web?

As for great UI's? Ask Jobs why the interface on FCP, DVDSP, Compressor, Soundtrack, Motion et al sucks like Gruber on Ive's manhood?

It's a god damn phone who gives a toss and how stupid do you have to be to be unable to work out how to use any cell phone ffs!

shush!

You know, Apple apologists are hard to take. But Fredrik's attempts to rationalize this piece of junk are just plain funny.

@ Frederik:

Wow, there's a lot of inaccuracy in your post. Let's start:

"Freerunner phone is NOT a competitor to the iPhone. "

Then why does the FSF advertise it as a competitor to the iPhone?

"this means that you can use it for any purpose and in any way you want to."

In theory, maybe. But in practice, the iPhone does a lot more than the Freerunner, and has more software available for it.

"The iPhone is an appliance (a dump machine preprogrammed to do one or two specific tasks and nothing more)"

Not sure what you mean by "dump machine" - but this statement is completely incorrect. Have you not seen that there are hundreds of applications already available for the iPhone? It does a lot more than "one or two" specific things. It's a handheld computer capable of running all sorts of code.

"backed up by a company that want market share."

Right... so who makes the Freerunner? I'm pretty sure it is assembled in factories by companies wishing to gain marketshare and profit. The processors in it are also designed and made by corporations looking to gain marketshare.

Do you believe that this phone is assembled by Open Software developers or something? Or perhaps magic FOSS pixies materialize it out of thin air? It's made for free as a charity case?

I'm really interested in kmnowing how you think the Frerunner is manufactured, if not by for-profit companies.

"one of the products is generative and general-purpose aimed, the other is a locked-down appliance."

Again, this conflicts with reality. The iPhone currently has a lot more general-purpose uses than the Freerunner, whose only function appears to be as an experiment for programmers.

"I'm curious though, what disservice does the rather political "warning" issued by the FSF do to the iPhone? There's no lying,"

What? The FSF's statement is full of lies. To name just two - they say that it allows people to track your location with GPS without your permission.

Secondly, it states that it is impossible to install Free Software on it. Once again, not true.

Then there's crap like "Apple puts you in a prison" and other unhinged, over-the-top rhetoric.

Their statement actually makes the FSF look very bad. Why do they need to resort to lies and propaganda to state their case?

o god, the keyboard is made for gulliver friends..

These are all valid points to make, but it's not smart to make a video and leave the most important bit of information out:

It's a developers phone!!

In the discussions on reddit, neowin or even here people are saying it's the worst thing ever and they should stop wasting their time trying to make it.
These people don't even seem to be aware that this is a work in progress, something still not meant for the consumer!

By making this video with such a negative tone you're doing a lot of damage to the openmoko name.

Once Openmoko finally becomes usable people will still be linking to these video's, probably.

It's all very well comparing it to the iPhone, but how does it compare to all the other handheld computers and smart phones?

It seems to me that every time Apple brings out a new product, it's praised and becomes a sort of holy step in consumer gadgets.

Everything after that product is compared to it. Windows was compared with MacOS, Windows XP was compared with MacOSX, again with Vista. Linux has been compared over and over with Apple OS's.

The iPod series practically dominates the market, even though there are hundreds of other players out there, and despite the fact that these other players are making their own advances in the field, and sometimes superceding the Apple counterpart, it's still not good enough for some reason.

Now it's time for the iPhone, a concept which wasn't invented by Apple, but due to the hype and success it developed we tend to forget that.

The problem with the comparisons - and they don't need to be comparisons, just review it - is that they start with the underlying statement, sometimes full out declaration, that the Apple product is wonderful and perfect, and yet another success produced by true genius. Obviously the competitor is going to look bad. It's like being in a room full of patriots and comparing their country to another.

I don't have a problem with the iPhone hardware, it's a wonderful piece of gadgetry, and seems to do what we want it to do, and with style, and the operating system it uses is good too. I have a few problems with the policies for being able to modify and personalize it, but as far as the general consumer is concerned, it's fine, a nice piece of electronic jewelry.

Just as the iPhone was Apple's entrance into the smart phone market, so it OpenMoko the entrance of the open source effort. While Apple is a huge company making products that people want to own, sometimes just for the sake of it - it's still just a phone after all - with quasi-limitless resources and backing, OpenMoko is a small but open company from Singapore trying to make a smart phone for which every aspect has documentation and is open and free to use.

The OpenMoko isn't the iPhone. It's not the black oblong that makes people's mouths water. It's equally not the a closed device, with closed hardware and limited development capacities, developed by hundreds of engineers, styled by experts and put in place by market experts, with a several million dollar funding. The OpenMoko is the effort of a small company trying to give people the opportunity to make their own smart phone and develop a gadget that's suited to them, and not a copy of the neighbours pride and joy. It shares values with the GNU philosophy and could have a slogan like Ubuntu, such as "the human smart phone".

In conclusion, and again, it's just not the iPhone, and just like the Bug Base, you should be warned that development skills, as well as an open mind, are needed to appreciate this project. Try looking past the flaws at what it really is.

Damn, I've been hearing about the phone and wanted to check it out, you saved me time with video; thanks Dave!

Thanks for this tour, I have been looking for a good video showing the phone. I still think it could be worth purchasing if they fix the keyboard issue down the road.

That's not out of the box. The out of the box keyboard was missing critical keys (no \, /, ;, or |) and much worse to use. Why on earth would you spend so much time bitching about a keyboard you made the decision to install?

Also, the application setup was different out of the box. You've added a bunch of apps to the phone you were doing the demo on. Once again, why bitch about trying to find the terminal application it was easy to find out of the box?

It looks to me like you read the "getting started" wiki page and did everything it suggested. That's a long way from out of the box.

WOW! All of the whining and the commentators quick to chime in! HAHAHA! Did anyone forget/fail to mention/or choose to ignore the fact that this device is clearly declared not ready for end-users, or how about being in development, or how about being a development device? Compared the the iPhone... OMG! STOP. YOU ARE ALL KILLING ME HERE!