The list of awesome phones:
HTC Phones
OpenMoko
Palm Pre
However, a new hotness has just been born.
The Nokia n900.
32 GB internal storage
Expandable to up to 48 GB with external microSD card
3.5G mobile network
Quadband GSM with GPRS and EDGE
Data transfers over a cellular network 10/2Mbps
Data transfers over Wi-Fi 54Mbps
Flash 9.4 support (In your face iPhone users, Nokia loves me)
5-megapixel (2584 × 1938 resolution) digital camera (iPhone is up to 3.2-megapixel)
800 × 480 resolution video recording
Dual LED flash
800 × 480 resolution screen
Tactile and onscreen QWERTY keyboards (Yes, none of this onscreen keyboard rubbish)
Removable battery (That probably won’t explode)
Assisted-GPS receiver
Ovi Maps pre-installed
TV out (PAL/NTSC) with Nokia Video Connectivity Cable (CA-75U, included in box) or WLAN/UPnP
Wide aspect ratio 16:9 (WVGA)
Video recording file format: .mp4; codec: MPEG-4
Video recording at up to 848 × 480 pixels (WVGA) and up to 25fps
Video playback file formats: .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp; codecs: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263
Music playback file formats: .wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a
The important part:
Development in C and Python are supported, using GTK.
Unfortunately it looks like C++ is not supported so anyone wanting to do any OOP will have to do it in Python.
That is great that Nokia are supporting open standards, releasing a mobile phone running Linux. It would be nice if they supported C++ too, but that is just my personal preference, and it may come in the future, I know all the C++ jazz is quite complex and definitely non-trivial.
I’d still rather use Python than C. I certainly hope that Windows Mobile dies and the highly overrated iPhone becomes less popular, not completely die, just put in its place. I would love to see the world embrace open standards, open source software and a rise in DRM free, happy, feel good devices, gain popularity and eventually dominate the market and warm people’s hearts.
Thumbs down on GTK, but it’ll be awesome once PySide is finished and Python has LGPL Qt bindings.
One deal-breaker, though: RRP = 550 Euros.
Yeah, mad expensive, but such awesomeness! OpenMoko has similar pricing problems, approximately 1.5x the price of a normal smart phone for 0.5x the features. They’ve definitely put a price on freedom. At a time when every man and his dog and cat and hamster are buying iPhones, the contenders should be at least the same price, if not cheaper to fight back.