I have an N950(bought of ebay) and i care about meego/maemo/tizen/fork of the week...
And in general that is nonsense, you've just mentioned the drawbacks of the N900 so why release a device which has the same drawbacks?
The SOC was lowend when it came out, and currently you could not find a smartphone with a SOC which even comes near it's performance even if you look at the pre-paid bargain bin at walmart.
We are literally talking about a SOC which will have issues playing a 1080p movie.
Why only 1GB RAM(other than the fact that the SOC they've chosen seems to not support more than that)? RAM costs absolutely nothing these days, the modems they've selected is also quite questionable considering it's made by a subsidiary of Gemalto especially for a "privacy" oriented device.
And 512MB Flash? this just puts unnecessary limitation on future developments of the Phone, which also means that it will probably not be well supported by the latest Meego forks or any major Linux distribution.
BTW according to their latest schematics i don't see any decent level of separation between the BPP and the SOC not on a hardware level at least, it seems that for the most part they still rely on the software to bring the modem back in line which well is iffy to begin with.
Just based on the hardware they put in the phone there is no reason for it to cost 100 EURO's not to mention 800-900. They've could went with decent hardware and still probably charge as half as much.
P.S.
Considering they use a SOC with a PowerVR GPU which uses a closed source linux driver and some other closed source drivers from what it seems i think they should change their tag line to "a mostly free software phone" :)
That driver issue alone should make the entirety of the privacy angle moot, it's completely closed and unaudited so for all you know it mirrors your screen so the folks at the NSA can see the porn you watch...
* "only 256MiB RAM" - Neo900 has 4 times more.
* "no BT 4.0" - WG7351-00 has BT 4.0 support.
* "no LTE" - you can choose PLS8 modem with LTE.
* "no proper USB OTG" - Neo900 has it, plus even internal USB pins for homemade mods.
* "no gyro" - Neo900 has one.
* "no compass" - Neo900 has one.
512MB flash comes together with RAM package, and it's actually nice to have just for better Maemo/N900 compatibility. There's no reason why you couldn't boot OS from eMMC, which will for sure be at least 32GB. Actually, if you plan to tinker a lot with the phone, I'd recommend having some sort of rescue OS in flash, and your own OS of choice on the first partition of eMMC.
1080p movie may be a bit tough to play on this SoC, right. 720p however should be fine, and I hardly see the point of going 1080p with 800x480 screen.
BPP and SoC are connected only via USB, audio codec and some GPIOs. It's pretty much as separated as it can be - maybe except using serial line instead of USB.
"They've could went with decent hardware and still probably charge as half as much." Of course - if we could produce number of units with a bit more zeros at its end, it would be very cheap. You haven't discovered anything special here - it's just standard economy of scale. With our current scale, any "modern" design would either cost ten times more, or wouldn't be possible to build at all due to lack of available components to buy in such low amounts.
That would be nice and all if the SOC could allow decent internet browsing experience and MM support.
So sorry i don't see how putting out a device with hardware which only slightly better than the original N900.
Yeah you'll have BT 4.0, decent WIFI and LTE but then again you won't be able to browse YouTube on that SOC properly.
I'm sorry but i really don't see the usefulness of a device with a single core 1Ghz CPU and 1GB ram these days and it's a damn shame, the whole idea behind Meamo/Meego is the freedom to do pretty much everything why put hardware in it that will not allow you to do anything?
Heck with that screen even office and text editing will be a bitch :(
Although I would prefer having a phone with an open-source GPU driver, the situation is not too bad with the Neo900: apparently you can run without the non-free blobs as long as you don't need 3D acceleration: http://neo900.org/faq#gfx
We are literally talking about a SOC which will have issues playing a 1080p movie. Why only 1GB RAM(other than the fact that the SOC they've chosen seems to not support more than that)? RAM costs absolutely nothing these days, the modems they've selected is also quite questionable considering it's made by a subsidiary of Gemalto especially for a "privacy" oriented device. And 512MB Flash? this just puts unnecessary limitation on future developments of the Phone, which also means that it will probably not be well supported by the latest Meego forks or any major Linux distribution.
BTW according to their latest schematics i don't see any decent level of separation between the BPP and the SOC not on a hardware level at least, it seems that for the most part they still rely on the software to bring the modem back in line which well is iffy to begin with.
Just based on the hardware they put in the phone there is no reason for it to cost 100 EURO's not to mention 800-900. They've could went with decent hardware and still probably charge as half as much.
P.S. Considering they use a SOC with a PowerVR GPU which uses a closed source linux driver and some other closed source drivers from what it seems i think they should change their tag line to "a mostly free software phone" :) That driver issue alone should make the entirety of the privacy angle moot, it's completely closed and unaudited so for all you know it mirrors your screen so the folks at the NSA can see the porn you watch...