Anyone here using their Freerunner as a daily phone yet?

Forums › Mobile handsets › Anyone here using their Freerunner as a daily phone yet?

lizardb0y

20 posts

Geek

#32516 18-Apr-2009 23:15

I've been running SHR-unstable (which as just been promoted to SHR-testing) for the past week and it's the closest I've found to a usable daily phone yet. I tried a few distros before settling on SHR:

Om2008.12

Pro: Good range of apps, basic tools have the basic features you'd expect, such as in-call volume control and the ability to import contacts into the contact list. An excellent selection of apps available. Kustomizer and FDOM provide quick and easy scripts for installing everything you can imagine. I ran Kustomizer on mine.

Con: The standard UI is horrible. Ugly square application icons on a black background, unusable keyboard, useless settings options. I found it slow and difficult to use. The QTopia UI was ugly and didn't fit in well with the rest of the UI, with the two soft-buttons at the bottom of the screen regularly vanishing. Slow. In the end both speaker and in-call volume somehow became muted and I couldn't get them back.

Om2009 Unstable Paroli

Pro: Nothing.

Con: Paroli may be the way of the future, but for now it's unusable, featureless and ugly. I ended up only running this for half an hour or so because I couldn't get it to do anything useful, like answer calls, have a contact list or otherwise act like a phone.

Om2009 Unstable

This is the version with the Illume UI. Looked good, but the

Pro: Seemed to run reasonably quickly, had a nice Illume UI. Basic apps seems to work well.

Con: Not very functional yet. I accidentally ran Paroli and couldn;t make it go away. I ended up having to ssh in a manually kill it.

SHR-Testing (17-04-09)

Pro: Fast, good looking Illume UI. Very responsive and so far very reliable. Suspend and resume are the fastest I've found yet - way faster than the old Windows Moble phone I had been using.

Con: Takes several second to answer a call after you hit the "Accept" button, during which time the ringer keeps ringing and nobody can hear anyone else. Dialler and PIM apps very basic - e.g. contacts only works with SIM contacts, dialler is just a dialler with not siginificant integration with contact or phone log. No calendar or tasks.

What are your experiences?

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NZIdol

17 posts

Geek

#208857 23-Apr-2009 19:01

Thanskfor sharing that,

Installed 2008.12 with Kustomizer before my trip to Europe and picked up a $29 2Gb Sandisk micro SD card and a Motorola car charger at DSE and loaded the device up with a whole heap of TangoGPS (>1Gb) maps for Europe. Even managed to hook up to some Wifi hotspots to download some more maps (TangoGps crashes if you try to download to much at a time). That worked near perfect (takes a while to get a first fix especially in a big city, and the GPS does not wakeup by itself after a suspend...). So clearly the Openmoko "Plan B" will have to be an opensource GPS device....

Tried 1 phone call and the sound at the other end was horrible, SMS messages (I had my NZ Sim in the Openmoko and a prepay in my normal phone) sometimes came thru but more often did not....

So as a GPS device good enough... as a phone not yet...

Wifi still a bit hit and miss and web-browsers also not great, did get to read my NZ e-mail but no HTTPS for gmail...

To improve the performance a bit I did create a swap-file on the SD-card and turned animations either off or set them to very fast.

Agree that Paroli is not very promising, they state as a goal that they want to make the device accessible to inexperienced programmers, yeah right... So yes SHR will probably be the way to go for now.