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CES: Hands On With OpenMoko Linux Handset

Today at CES I was able to spend a few moments playing with the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner mobile phone. It was not fully functional, but the features that did work on this open source Linux phone looked really great. Read on for more first impressions.

All I can say is, Thank Goodness for Lunch @ Piero's. This little event crams journalists and vendors into a tiny restaurant just across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center. In between meetings, I was able to dash over there and take the Neo for a test drive.

First off, the hardware is downright beefy. While I like the overall look and feel of the prototype, it is a very thick phone and will not be very pocket friendly. It had barely any buttons on the exterior, extolling them for a full touch screen user interface. The feel of the prototype screen was very mushy. Either it had been pawed into submission by a gazillion journalists, or it was not built to a very high degree of sturdiness. Anyway. On to the software.

The appearance of the home screen was kept to a simple clock in the center and two sets of control "buttons" above and below the clock in a manner similar to the four home screen icons on the bottom of the iPhone. There are four control buttons along the bottom that take you to the calling pad, the messaging center, the contact database and a connections menu that presumably will be reserved for the Internet. Each of these buttons brings you to an entirely separate screen with its own touch controls. These secondary screens were all a bit buggy and incomplete.

Along the top of the home screen are smaller, more difficult to use buttons for accessing the phone's inner workings, settings and menus. There were so small as to beg for stylus input, but I was able to get them to work with a fingernail. As with the other second-layer menus, these were also incomplete and buggy.

Still, my first impressions were positive overall. The interface appears clean and was intuitive for the most part. I had no trouble figuring out which buttons to push to get where I wanted to go. Not bad for a platform developed in the last six months from a collective of developers.

I wish some of the hardware specs were better, but I am interested to see how the FreeRunner comes together further over the next six months with the help of the developer community.

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