Random Openmoko thoughts

Some ideas have been bothering be for a while, decided to write them down here, maybe they’re interesting to someone else too.

Nokia 900

• A great device hardware-wise. Nice to see it running Linux but phone stack still closed. See ‘This is Linux from Finland
• I wouldn’t be surprised it it was already patented, but I think it’s a great idea to zoom in/out by making a circular motion on the touch screen – maybe something Openmoko browsers could use?
• When you turn N900 screen to portrait position it’ll start the ‘simple’ phone app – and on landscape it runs the ‘computer’ stuff. A nice idea again!

Paroli

• Work to make it work smoothly on SHR is being done (GREAT job Laszlo!!!), see http://git.paroli-project.org/
• Some UI hacks might be also there soon. I myself prefer having the buttons on bottom of the screen to be always able to see what’s on the screen.
• Waiting to see a working package on SHR to allow easy installation: opkg install paroli

SHR

• Settings is nice, supports stuff from power management to connections to much more, also looks good.
• Phone apps work OK though slow when reading stuff from SIM (-> opimd support, where are you…?)
• I like the buttons at the bottom of the screen – but they could use some rethinking:
  • Most of the time the ‘next’ button (be it new, OK, send) is on the bottom left.
  • Sometimes there’s a close/exit/back button on bottom right, sometimes not. This makes you have to close an app (for example call log) from illume top bar. Not very nice.
  • Now there are 1-4 buttons next to each other (settings: only the quit button, phone log: call/add/numbers/duration)
  • I like the ‘options’ -button of contacts to show more stuff. How about moving ‘new’ there and adding ‘close/back/exit’ on the bottom right?
• A single button to take you to ‘home view’ would be nice – that’s why iPhone has that one HW button.
• Hundreds of contacts in the contacts list makes it a pain to scroll. Some thoughts:
  • The finger scrolling works nice
  • The scrollbar’s too small to use
  • How about starting the view from middle of the list, not from the beginning (to reduce need of scrolling)
  • How about creating jump buttons:
    • Alphabetic, like Paroli does
    • or start/middle/end
• So far SHR’s been the most usable distro I’ve had. People are not complaining about the audio quality, suspend/resume is reliable, nice GUI’s to start GPRS & GPS etc.
• I’d like to be able to adjust the volume during call
• I’d like to see the duration of the call during a call (can I already see it? Don’t know.. :)

Misc

• We’re still waiting to be able to use the accelerometers to silent the phone / answer a call / something. Saw today Mickey started to write accelerometer support for FSO – very nice!

(also have a look at my outdated Openmoko wishlist)

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