The iPhone launches today and as I’ve said previously, I won’t be getting one. I’m planning to wait for a cheaper and better one later. But long before that happens, there may well be an army of iPhone clones to choose from. One in particular that has just caught my attention is the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of phones with touch screen interfaces that do x, y, and z before the year ends, but the OpenMoko platform is about more than that. It’s another one of those radical long haired hippy open source projects that rants about freedom and open (hackable) standards! LOL God I love this stuff!^_^
While the Neo1973 is certainly not on the same level as the iPhone, it does offer some glimpse of what a clone will look like. I like a stylish phone, but more to the point, I really don’t like the look of a QWERTY keyboard on the face of a phone like the Blackberry or similar smartphones. I could get used to it yes, but I don’t like it. A good clone must have a touchscreen interface, but beyond that things will get murky. Why? Because programming a good interface is not trivial. So I’m sure that a lot of them will suck at first. But there is hope, because once the interface is freed from dependence on the hardware, upgrading it is just a matter of better software. And beyond that, personalization of the interface is a reachable goal. I only hope that the threat of lawsuits won’t block this progress.