It has been a while that many geeks and technology freaks have been waiting for the ultimate camera/phone/mp3/palm/cheapcalls device. Truth is it was a big hit once phones had cameras but lets face it those cameras suck big time, the best ones are some shitty lens 5MP that cost more than anyone would ever want to spend in a cellphone besides although it did cause a huge amount of hype at first most people realized that having a camera in their cellphone is pretty useless unless its for taking pictures of your friends for the picture caller ID some phones have. Then there was the advantage of phones being able to play mp3, that was misconception since people actually thought you would be able to use it as an mp3 player but oh surprise you can only carry 5 songs, yes things have changed in deed and now some phones carry between 5GB to 8GB but unfortunately what nobody considered is that its battery is not made to be a phone AND an mp3 player at the same time so if you dare use it like an mp3 player you'll end up without battery by the middle of the day and having to spend the rest of the day unreachable(reason enough to commit suicide according to some extremists). Well there was also the smartphones or the palmlike devices that do pretty much anything you like, from playing your favorite songs to running an emulator for consoles like nes, gba and snes, hell some of them even have linux installed which give you endless possibilities but again the bad news comes around, you don't have enough disk space. Most of those devices came with as much as 128mb of space with an SD slot where you could install the amazing amount of 4 shitty GB to try and feed your needs. Now to many thats more than enough, the same with the 8GB iphone but to somebody like me with an mp3 collection of 80GB thats just a bit too annoying plus the battery wasn't all that good in those devices either. So whats wrong with phone companies? Is there something they are missing? some weird uncovered technology they still have to investigate about? NO

Truth is the technology to make a neat and powerful phone is there but they just dont really care much for it. The ipod is the best example. Apple came up with a really neat design for a piece of crap and it sold like crazy, the piece of shit lasts less than 6 months(about 7 out of 10 or so at least) they take your freedom away by not even letting you use it without itunes and its shitty database thingy to prevent you from taking out the mp3s(too bad if your computer just died you cant get those files out of your darn thing) and had no features at all except playing music(with the worst quality compared to most of its competitors) and some shitty games. On the other hand there where a bunch of players that had video encoded in divx(not the shitty video format apple uses for its ipods now) years before ipod video came out, had inline mp3 and ogg encoding which means you can plug it into a stereo an encode directly to mp3 without a computer, also had a usb host which meant you could plug in your camera or another mp3 player and share files without a computer. But still people want an ipod because its an ipod and nothing else.

This leaves us in a disadvantage because as new phones keep hitting the market we realize one thing they have the same shitty features a phone had 3 years ago but with a better design. Yeah there are a few out there that are actually moving towards new technologies but only  the very very few whose prices are outrageous. By now all the technologies from 3 years ago are cheap as hell, the phone companies just stop wasting money in new stuff and they recycling the same old crap. I just got a new Motorola L6, it does exactly the same things that my old nokia 6230 does and I got the later 3 years ago while this one is brand new. Sure its slim and its prettier thats just it. I'm even in a disadvantage because my old nokia had expandable memory( I installed a 1GB MMC card into it) this one doesn't.

So while the market is being filled with old technologies with a new look we have no choice but to look up to the cool phones that cost a lot of money like the new iphone hoping that it actually has a bunch of new features and it is in fact reinventing the cellphone. Well big disappointment there.

Lets have a look at the iphone's high technology. It has a multi touch screen, wow touch screens where invented about 10 years, ok so this one is a multi touch screen, thats a bit better but thats only a small advantage to the pda's that you can use as a phone device that have been in the market since 5 years ago. It has wireless, this is actually a very very good move, I'm only annoyed that phones with wireless are very hard to find, they have been around since two years ago but the phone companies would rather not handle them since wireless means free internet and that on a phone means cheap VoIP calls but still nokia came up with wireless phones since 2005 for relatively cheap prices(200USdls). It has OSX installed, yes so its the first with OSX installed but now you get into personal likes and dislikes, the advantage about having an actual operating system in your phone is that it gives you freedom, freedom to install whatever you want on it but this is not the first one. Both motorola and nokia have linux based phones in the market, symbian is also a great operating system(alas not as good as linux or maybe OSX but considering the amount of time symbian has been out there Im sure theres more applications for it than for OSX the phone version) besides the only thing that would benefit from it having OSX is the eye candy. It has sensors to detect whether the phone is near you or not, upside down or not and whenever your raising the phone; thats the neat part of the phone, you implement a technology that was developed 20 years a go into a phone and you can call it high tech because nobody has done it before besides since they are only sensors they are cheap as hell(I was programing sensors to do similar tasks with legos when I was in high school!).

The main advantage of the phone is its usability and I'm sure thats where apple wasted most of its money. It has an eye candy full operating system, combined with silly features that enhance the whole idea all together giving you a great user experience regardless of the rest of its features. That plus a slick design is a sure winner like the ipod proved but then again it would have happened no matter what. As soon as they said it was an ipod and phone combined it didn't really matter if it had a multi touch screen or not, or if it had sensors or not that thing was going to be a big hit because it was made by apple the same way the ipods have taken over the market even though they are the shittiest mp3 players out there. But unlike the ipods the iphone actually has cool features that compete with the feature full phones even though no real technological advances happened.

So is it actually worth it? That depends on what sort of person you are. I would rather go for the openmoko phone because of the simple reason it has linux on it and both the software and hardware are open source but then again many don't understand what open source is so they don't really care, and most people even after being explained what open source is they just don't grasp the idea of it and still wouldn't care. So I guess as with the ipod the iphone will be a big success.

Why is the openmoko phone better? well its simply open source which means I can change the theme it has to one exactly like the one on the iphone, it has a neat design as well, being open source there will be a lot of users developing cool stuff for it both in the hardware level and in the software level which means any new technology that comes out is very likely to be implemented to the open moko as soon as possible either with a download or a physical add on. For instance lets take wimax for example, the wimax standard is still being defined but there wont be any phone with wimax until 2008 or so but with the open moko once the standard is released a guy into electronics can design an add on to the open moko phone so that it supports wimax and you don't have to buy another phone, its not that hard to do since open moko releases its hardware details so people know how and what to tweak. With another phone the phone is never actually yours, theres a law that was passed that renders illegal to flash your phone therefore you cant really change much of the phone, if it where possible people could install linux into their java based phones and have a smartphone when they bought a java phone, phone companies would then loose a possible smartphone buyer so they simply don't want that. But then again heres the big question why cant I alter something I bought? Well thats the main reason open moko came to the market to fight that sort of laws because it really sounds just idiotic to buy something thats never actually going to be yours.

But open source is still difficult to explain, the best way to know why open source is an advantage is to experience it, most linux freaks like me would always prefer anything open source but others simply have no idea why.

So most people will still buy the iphone regardless of whatever they hear but the ones that are always looking for personalisation the iphone hasn't gotten there yet. Besides the open moko does offer some neat features that the iphone designers simply forgot, one of them is GPS.

Other interesting projects are Belkin and Trolltech phones. Qtopia is a linux based operating system, belking released a phone with wireless that has qtopia and skype preinstalled, thats sure to be a hit in cities where there is wireless everywhere. Trolltech also released phones with qtopia in it.

And as far as technology goes well even the open moko phone hasn't gotten there yet. The most exciting thing that has happened to the phones recently is wireless and now I'm personally waiting for wimax. A good space solution would also be great but for now the best thing as far as that goes is the way too expensive iphone and the high end nokias that cost just as much or even more.

Whenever the open moko releases the version with wirless Ill think about it mostly because its open source and therefore practically upgradeable. But I'm still waiting to be amazed by a phone that could actually bring something new to the cellphone industry.

If you ask me I would start moving everything into bluetooth, talking of TV remote controls, hell even the door locks and then start controlling it from my phone, now that would be a neat phone.

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