Finally the community behind the Neo1973 project has made an announcement regarding the availability, the pricing and the roadmap of this product . They also explained why they named it Neo1973. Apparently 1973 is the year of the first mobile phonecall and OpenMoko marks the beginnings of a new era in mobile telephony, a new (neo) 1973. I will present you here the new informations available on the Neo1973 smartphone and the OpenMoko effort.
Well you won’t like to find out that the product has been postponed and it won’t be released in January due to some hardware difficulties. However the manufacturers will send a limited number of phones to active members of the community (for free) starting the 11th of February and the source code will be made available on the same date. After this pre-launch a testing period of one month will follow with the probable purpose of testing and developing applications before the official two stages launch. The first phase, starting 11th of March, will mean the product will be available for online orders from the whole world at a price of $350 plus the shipping taxes. 6 months later, on the 11th of September, the device will benefit from another launch and this time it would be present in stores while also being available for online sales. At the same time the 2nd generation of the device will be introduced.

In the same announcement the final features of the product have been confirmed:

• 120.7 x 62 x 18.5 (mm)
• 2.8″ VGA (480×640) TFT Screen
• Samsung s3c2410 SoC @ 266 MHz
• Global Locate AGPS chip
• Ti GPRS (2.5G not EDGE)
• Unpowered USB 1.1
• Touchscreen
• micro-sd slot
• 2.5mm audio jack
• 2 additional buttons
• 1200 mAh battery (charged over USB)
• 128 MB SDRAM
• 64 MB NAND Flash
• Bluetooth v2.0

The team working on the smartphone is currently developing an application core to this device but every person will be able to create its own version as the phone’s hardware and software specifications are fully open. The Neo1973 will be running a Linux operating system based on the 2.6.17.14 kernel, Xorg7.1 and the 4.1 version of the gcc compiler. Additional informations and the source code will be made available with the launch. If you want to check the original announcement made today you only need to click this link and be sure to come back here to DevicePedia for fresh informations on this and other new devices.

Filed under Mobile phones