Nokia responds to iPhone by Promoting 'Open'

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Sun Oct 7 17:33:32 UTC 2007


On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 10:41 +0100, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 10:18:35PM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> > Well, the Neo has proprietary software "on it" if you count the internal
> > modem. I'm not sure how interesting a list that would be, particularly
> > if you count firmware - the number of devices would basically be zero.
> > 
> > There is always some aspect of a device which is proprietary.
> 
> As far as I could understand from the Neo's information, it's all Free
> Software except some components put in ROM (well, maybe it's a REPROM)
> like the GSM and GPS components, allowing the system to operate without
> BLOBs.

Not quite, as I understand it. The GPS is a somewhat separate story,
since it's not clear what chipset they're going forward with - the
current one is proprietary, but I doubt that users of the GTA02 Neo will
suffer that - even the current proprietary one has had some decent
reverse engineering done it.

The GSM thing isn't in ROM; it's a GSM modem that's connected to an
internal serial port. It's just like plugging in an external modem in
the old days - it's effectively a separate piece of hardware, and you
just send it AT commands.

Cheers,

Alex.






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