0.5Gb internal storage. The Galaxy phone I point at can put a microSD in too - it's not quite the same as saying that it's got that as primary internal storage. And that Galaxy has 1Gb internal storage. My point is that YOU pay for the microSD. The device INCLUDE the internal storage in the price. And you get less with this device, for more cost.

And again, my point is cost. If you can get off-the-shelf components to do something similar for VASTLY reduced prices, then you have to wonder what you're paying for. If you can get a Samsung phone - with roughly the same makeup and components for 1/5th the price, and if you can build stuff with similar chips for similar purposes (even including LCD touchscreens, etc.) that use open-standards to communicate and no "hidden firmware" for a pittance - again, what are you PAYING for with this device?

This isn't how much things like this cost, clearly. Maybe the BOARD is more expensive, as it's custom. Maybe a PARTICULAR screen is more expensive as it's in limited supply. But the overall device? It's a bog-standard phone. Quite what "unfree" firmware does a commercial device like a Galaxy have once you've rooted the Android install on it? Pretty much the same as this device - the GSM chip will have a proprietary firmware to ensure radio compliance.

And if not, how much would it cost to replace, say, the GPS functionality on the Samsung with an "open" replacement? Again, nowhere NEAR the cost of this device (which is basically doing something similar by relying on the manufacturing for a previous device to provide the baseline).

In runs of one and tens, yes, maybe this price is reasonable. In runs of 100's and 1000's - no.. it's really not. Not in the age of ubiquitous fast low-power common-bus chips for all these functions.

This reminds me of the open-graphics-card initiatives. The time spent on starting from scratch (and inevitably relying on some closed piece of hardware at the end anyway) means that by the time it comes along few are interested, the costs are enormous, the parts are hard to obtain and the device quickly becomes obsolete (the project that springs to mind was still advertising PCI-only functionality just a year ago, not even PCIe). And it's based on FGPA's that you have to buy from a commercial vendor that doesn't publish their designs...

I'm a purchaser of niche products. I have a GP2X and some of its predecessors and successors, I programmed for it, it was built in tiny runs, cost more than equivalents, and was quickly obsoleted by commercial devices but it was "open" - it was ARM chips with a Linux install that you could code down to the bootloader.

5 times the cost of a (pretty expensive) commercial device that does the same and has the support of a major international company is a lot to ask for a niche product that doesn't do anything "special" (any Android machine, by definition, could run a plain Linux install if you so wanted to do that), is reliant on finding parts from old phones, and needs a tiny production run meaning you probably can never get the parts for it again if it goes wrong.

I'm not against the idea, here. I'm against the execution. There are cheaper phones that have bog-standard hardware that you can replace any firmware with open-firmware if you needed to (or even the entire functionality of that particular feature with another free equivalent) and put them in a case. In fact, here, the case is the CHEAP part. That's the part you could easily redesign to shove any board taken from a phone into. The electronics for a hobby project, however, is never going to get near the cost, reliability, even safety of a commercial product re-purposed.

The ideal isn't mine, particularly, but the execution seems incredibly poor is that's the closest you can get to price-point. Double-the-cost, maybe. FIVE TIMES is ludicrous.

Down-payment.

P.S. Your link clearly says "DOWN PAYMENT". That means not full payment for the device.

Much like any GSM development board, then.

So what's "free" about it besides an output pin to push the GSM chip into reset mode?

FAQ page. Store was dead in seconds of the Slashdot posting.

But... the main communications chip still has a closed source firmware. So, actually.. what's changed? Sure, you can turn the radio off but that kinda defeats the point of having a phone.

"According to current calculations, the cost of the motherboard should be somewhere around 990 EUR. The complete device will cost about 150 EUR more, depending on prices and availability of N900 spare parts."

Holy cow, freedom (at least partial freedom) comes at a seriously hefty price. That's five times the cost of a half-decent Samsung Galaxy (S4 or S4 Mini, not network-locked), where I'm from.

And for 1GHz, 1Gb RAM, 0.5Gb storage. That's not even close to the spec of the above Samsung.

Pay five times the cost, get less back, and the possibility of component shortage making repair/replacement impossible.

How do this stack up against the $9 CHIP project, etc. with its processor? I can build a GSM "phone" with Wifi, SD, touchscreen etc. from Arduino shields for way, way, way less than this costs on top of that.

I mean, for God's sake, they've bothered to put IrDA and FM radio on it!

Niche doesn't even begin to cover it. When you're more expensive than Apple, and can't do anywhere near as much, you know that you're onto a loser.

I have any number of old disks but just sitting and ISO'ing them would take forever. Shipping costs would also be prohibitive.

However, I would be interested in finding a few old DOS utils that I used to have, and several of those old "we send you a floppy catalogue, you create an order, send the floppy back and we send you the shareware you ordered" services that had the weirdest of things that you couldn't get hold of anywhere else.

Interactive touchscreens now, and short-throw projectors directly above the board.

And it's a standard part of a UK teacher job interview to do a lesson on an interactive whiteboard. You can't escape it and teacher-training prepares you for it.

It's quite literally an all-day-every-day tool in every school I've ever worked in.

I still have a complete set of INPUT magazine. Some of the biggest programs in it are exactly that, with explanations of the decoding.

Hell, I even chatted to one guy on here who had written one of the biggest of those programs when he was just a kid.

Those were the days.

Show me how that works for Windows login without the exact software mentioned above?

LDAP. Yes. AD login from Windows login screen? No.

I work in schools, I'd love to move to key authentication to save all the "kids forgetting their password / stealing their friends password" hassle (physical items are more difficult to lose or "steal" without getting into more trouble!) but the costs are still FUCKING ludicrous for any such solution and two-thirds of that cost is just software and nothing to do with the devices at all. Still struggling to justify this:

The software to put this into AD logins (which is what most businesses use to tie all their stuff together and do the simplest of logins) is $48/user. Plus $25/user for the key. That's nearly $30k just to get a small school logged on with the system. By the time you buy spares, train users, tie it into your systems, etc. you're looking at a $50k project at least. That's the IT budget gone. Just to replace a password with the simplest of login dongles.

And when 2/3rds of that is software (not hardware) which you just have to hope is available for the next version of your OS (GINA logins went the way of the dodo already), works on the servers when you have an emergency and need to login, hope it works for things like kids logging into school websites from home (or even remote desktop, etc.)... it's stupendously expensive for such a simple thing.

I can't justify paying that much for the one-off cost of writing the software to login.

These ideas are great - would love to deploy them and will gladly pay a lot of money for them. But having the device isn't even 1% of the problem. The software, the ongoing compatibility, etc. consume most of the costs and there's no guarantee at all as the system expands.

I'd much rather pay for the keys and then pay even a few thousand a year for some licensed software to sort out the in-between parts. But everything is either needing a smartcard reader on every PC (useless in tablet environments and remote logins from home) or - more likely - stupendously expensive software.

Anyone know of a sensibly priced solution?

Cygwin works well until you get other programs that use it. You either have to install them within your Cygwin install folder (and hope they are able to cope with Cygwin updates you make, e.g. to Cygwin 2) or suffer DLL hell. Look at the Cygwin FAQ for ".DLL" - if you're not familiar with those errors already, you haven't used Cygwin very much. Now consider across a bunch of workstations on a network.

"Want say tunneling to a Windows service? If you use Windows only as a client...."

Don't. Use a proper tool. PuTTY is a client, not a server. This is like saying that ssh-client is no good at being sshd,.. of course not. But that's not what we're talking about.

And the fact is that for every SSH server set up (properly), you probably have 10-100 clients joining to it or you wouldn't bother setting it up. And one of the main points of things like SSH servers is cross-compile farms and remote access. And almost all the universities that offer such services recommend PuTTY if you're on Windows (because they've dealt with the Cygwin issues, I assure you, and decided it's not worth the hassle).

Opinion, of course. So's yours. Just because it's contrary doesn't make it more or less valid.

However, PuTTY is widely used and recommended for everything from talking to your Arduino's over a serial port to logging into your University server... go take a look. Cygwin - if and when it comes up - is not mentioned in nearly as many places for such simple actions.

Cygwin is, in fact, overkill for the majority of users who just want to use SSH, telnet or serial services from Windows. If they wanted Linux, generally they end up installing it in preference to Cygwin.

Most schools in London (and throughout the UK) already have interactive whiteboards in every classroom.

So, to be fair, it's no more difficult to doodle on them than an ordinary whiteboard. But you can't go to Google and doodle over the diagram on a pen-only board.

And the most popular brand, SmartBoard, have Linux drivers and software. Nobody ever uses that, because schools get Microsoft (and, no, they don't have humongous discounts or kickbacks - MS licensing is one of my biggest budget items every year).

So if you're already on Microsoft and already on whiteboards, it's dumb to suggest going back to pencil and paper for the majority of your teaching / learning.

Personally, I don't get why we bother to spend years teaching kids to write with a pen when they still struggle with maths and science into their teen years. Teach them block capitals, move on.

(Please note, my comments may not reflect the opinion of any of my employers, past or present - but to be honest, the way things are moving, it's that huge a leap to suggest it. This September, we're starting to roll out individual iPads to the kids.)

That's just because they compiled without specifying the build number.

That's LITERALLY a ten-second fix and recompile to resolve.

Don't identify software / spam / viruses by "it has X feature that's easily copied", whether that's a registry entry, a process name or an arbitrary string.

Publish the damn checksums at a minimum, or GPG signing key ideallly.