Touching base with phones on bikes

There's plenty going on in the world of Openmoko, too much for me to comment on fully without spending a lot of time on the matter, but I'm not sure if that's the best way for me to spend my days. I'll just link to things that I think have been important:

• Kevin Dean really knows his stuff; good rant

• Openmoko 2008.8 released and shortly followed by emails like these. Early days yet, however. I skinned my installation up. Looks so good, works rubbish ;-)

• Debian! and an official port. Awesome!

• gvSIG mobile on Openmoko & Jalimo continues forwards.

• Paul-Valentin Borza released the excellent looking Gestures; a product of his Google Summer of Code project. We've got a lot of ideas for this sort of thing.

• Raffa translated this article from the original Spanish; really interesting to see Openmoko, and more importantly Open Source Software, in a Spanish tabloid.

• Full schematics for the two Openmoko phones can now be freely downloaded. Great stuff! How much more open could they be? The CAD files for the cases have been available for some time.
  

Let's touch base a bit more with mention of one of my favourite things, bicycles. My first post concerning fixing a Neo 1973 to my bike was a while back, long before I was ever syndicated onto planet.openmoko.org, but there's been rumblings since. First I FreeRunner'ed my bike:

(note: using a touch-screen phone whilst slipstreaming a bus, front wheel a foot away from its vertical rear end, at 30+ mph is very frightening)

Chris Ball did something similar, as did André Gaul. A nice thread sprang up too. Notice, however, that both Chris and André employed fancy handlebar mounts! I don't know whether I'm the closest to my bike roots, or simply the most keen to risk breaking my telephone. Oh, wait, that mention should go to Brad Midgley ;-)

Everyone, of course, seems to be using TangoGPS for their bike mapping, although some seem to be putting it to more exciting uses than I. Why isn't this killer piece of software included in every distribution? Maybe we'll get an idea from reading this one to the end; not good stuff. On a side note, this is one of the reasons why I'm really keen for Openmoko to provide some decent drivers for their hardware and let big groups of people like the Debian team go off and start coding stuff up. I remember the fun I used to have with my old WRT54g and OpenWRT; we need more independent communities springing up to do software for this phone.

oBiCo looks like it could be one to keep an eye on, although I'm more interested in the potential of the Openmoko; things like mobile Internet access and TangoGPS' friends feature seem perfect for cyclists.

I think that's the end... In short, there's a lot of stuff going on; much of it good, some less so. I remain optimistic.