OpenMoko’s Neo 1973 The New Rival For iPhone

There are more and more smartphones that are supposed to beat iPhone announced. And here is the new Neo 1973 Linux based smartphone that has been created earlier and is the rival of the iPhone. Well, it appeared last November so it is older then iPhone. However, it is not worse and has one very important advantage that we are going to talk about later.

Appearance
iPhone has a very similar interface to the Neo’s one and does not differ much from it. If you look at the two phones placed on the table you would think that they are made by one designer. The color of edges and even the color are very similar. They have different shapes and sizes.

iPhone is just slightly smaller than Neo 1973 and it is also thinner. iPhone measures 115 mm x 61 mm x 11.6 mm while OpenMoko Neo 1973 120.7 mm x 62 mm x 18.5 mm. As you see there is only big difference in thickness. However, thicker phone does not mean better phone.

The corners of the Neo 1973 smartphone are rounded up and this makes it look smaller than it really is. And not so round corners of iPhone do not cancel its size out. However, iPhone is not that big and it does not need such effects.

Screen
OpenMoko has made its screen really good; with its size, only 2.8 ” it has a very high resolution: 480 x 640 pixels it beats iPhone. It is a TFT touch-screen that has multi-touch function enabled. Coincidentally iPhone has the screen with the same technology and it differs in size and resolution. iPhone’s screen is bigger but its resolution is much smaller: 320 x 480 pixels. Probably you will not see much difference there when using your gadget but if you look through pictures or watch videos you will see the difference.

Hardware
We do not know all the tiny specs about iPhone but we can present you the information about Neo 1973.

* 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 (2.0)

You would say that it is definitely slower than iPhone and not as powerful as iPhone however it appeared earlier and it is easier to buy it nowadays. Having very many features is not all; it is very important how you realize them.

Software
There are two sides of coin in this case. Firs of all OpenMoko Neo 1973 is totally open source and that means that you will be able to install any application you want on your gadget smartphone. Besides, most of applications are going to be free. Thanks to OpenMoko strategy about sharing the revenue with software developers very many new free applications will appear. The only problem is that there are not many applications that would work with Linux nowadays but their number will grow. It would be a big advantage towards iPhone because iPhone is totally blocked and you will not be able to install any applications on it. I would actually prefer opened OS and not the closed one.

Some Features
The creators of Neo 1973 had very many revolutionary ideas about smart-phones. Ideas like: location – based profiles that would use GPS to locate your position and change the profile when you enter the office for example.

The other cool idea is to set up something like a scheduled conference. A meeting between two phones would automatically start a conversation at certain date and time.

Actually OpenMoko sees future smart phones not as gadgets that would rapidly loose value and become useless several years later. But they want to make smart-phones like portable computers that you can modify and personalize and that would increase their value.

There is a big difference between these phones: one of them is power of iPhone and the other one is the openness of Neo 1973. A weaker Neo gadget but it has a big advantage of installing and using the software you like that I think covers all the disadvantages.

Having a classy iPhone or just an older Neo 1973 is a decision that you need to make if you want to buy something like this. However, there is one more thing we would like you to know. Paying $ 500 – $ 600 for iPhone that has a closed OS is not very smart when you can have a good opened OS phone for just about.

High tech gadgets are a man’s best friend. Give a guy a flatscreen TV, a mobile phone and a notebook computer, and he’s a happy camper. Even a desktop pc with a laser printer can make a geek’s day.