Community Matters

One thing puzzles me. Lots of people bought the Motorola Ming (or A1200 as it is also called). Lots of people are trying to make it work better, mostly with hacks (see the majority of the postings at MotorolaFans.Com). But there isn’t really a developer community that is writing software for it and addresses the issues that people are having.

Why? Simple. While Linux is open source and Motorola of course follows the rules of the GPL and makes the necessary sources available, they are not making available the necessary tools to build your own firmware image and flash it onto the phone. So even though I see that the calendar sucks (gee - you can’t tell from looking at it if a meeting starts on the hour or half past the hour? You’re kidding me!), I can’t simply replace it. Even though there are many small fixes that I’d like to apply (the battery meter is simply terrible; charge the phone for ten minutes and it shows fully charged, only to drop down to “red - about to die” after powering it on for 30 minutes - that’s useless), I can’t fix this.

I understand the need to control the radio stack and the access to the SIM and many issues concerning the network interaction. So put those in a signed binary and have the hardware refuse to operate when the signature of that binary can’t be verified. Tivo figured that out many years ago. But give us access to the smart part of this smartphone. I bet that if Motorola did that the community would come together and create the killer applications that would make more people want to buy this rather expensive phone. Which is clearly in Motorola’s best interest.

Unfortunately, it seems they don’t get it. Maybe this would be a way to address the issues that caused their stock price to drop like a rock last week…

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