Monday, October 15, 2007

Got my FIC Neo1973

Today I finally got my FIC Neo1973, a OpenMoko based mobile phone. Man from the packet service called and woke me up telling that he'll bring the packet in five minutes. I was ready in a minute and counting seconds until the doorbell rang.

It was like a Christmas when I opened the package revealing it's contents:



The phone on the left, stylus package, battery, wires and all other stuff on the right side of the package.

Finally I took the phone on my hand:



Great. It's a little bit bigger than I thought. But it fits to my hand and isn't too heavy. There's a handy pouch included in which you can carry the stylus and Neo1973 with you without a fear to scratch the screen. Memory card slot is under SIM slot and both of them are under the battery so changing a memory card is not a easy task. Here's picture about the interiors:



The phone was shipped without rootfs installed, only uboot and kernel. As a first thing I flashed new kernel and newest devlopment rootfs. Got the device booting:



And here's finally the UI up and running:




First impressions is that the boot process takes quite a long time. It's not like forever, but have to be patient. The software is not quite ready yet and they have a lot to do, some apps simply does not work or works only partially. I faced also problems with GSM calls, the GSM just doesn't seem to work. Find out that this bug might cause the problems since doing things on the command line as they told in the comments made it power up the GSM and to make it able to call (with AT commands).

However I keep on testing the device and will definately report more impressions about the device and the software.