“Trolltech’s Linux/Qtopia-powered Greenphone aims to provide a real (rather than emulated) hardware platform for mobile phone application developers to test their applications on. This hands-on review takes an in-depth look at the phone’s software environment, and at the development tools supplied with it.”
The idea of shucking out $700 for a phone that is not usable as a decent phone leaves me rather cold.
well it is only meant for people interresting in developing applications for qtopia, but you are right, for developers that would write opensource applications without intent to sell them it is a tad too much, especially since apparently its not good enough for every day use in its current form.
Yes, it’s expensive. But consider the alternatives when you want to develop on cellphone hardware. For the average developer, there are none. This isn’t a consumer product, it’s a premade embedded cellphone development platform.
The price of the Greenphone is because Trolltech is not a hardware manufacturer. These were all custom made in a small lot. Maybe if they made 100,000 of these it would be cheaper.
Still sounds more like a premature embedded cellphone development platform to me.
This isn’t a consumer product, it’s a premade embedded cellphone development platform.
Exactly, and even more important it’s rather cheap. If you go shopping for embedded tools and compare it to other offerings, you will see exactly that. A development board with a reasonable powerfull ARM or Freescale processor are in the range 100-250 USD or more. On top of that you have to add the cost of development environment. Either buying one for your developmet board(easily 1k USD, check MontaVista prices) or the cost of porting it yourself.(You get a Gratis version for most Freescale boards, but it has size limits).
Our per-seat developer tools cost for ARM development in telephony is approximately $0.
We use GCC/GDB and ship product with it.
If you need ARM JTAG, I recomment the BDI2000, which works well with Unix hosts, requires no additional software, and speaks GDB, making it useful beyond initial bring up.
On the other hand, you’re dead on about the devboard costs. If you want some sticker shock, ask TI to price out their OMAP730 Perseus 2 prototype for you. (and remember that it’s now a bit out of date.)
The expensive bit is working a vendor like broadcom or qualcomm on the actual RF side of the house. For what the QT Greenphone appears to give apps developers you could probably do fine with a < $200 TSARM 7200 board and the GNU tools.
The interesting thing about developing for a smart phone is developing aps that use the telephony. Sure wasn’t much of that apparent in this article.
It’d be nice to know about that telephony API