Chaos Pavanred's Blog ….. Exponential Error

OpenSource in Mobile Phones

MotoRazr2 V8. This phone is stunning by looks, by features etc in its league.
There are loads spoken about its appreciable all over. Anyway I want to bring this one major disadvantage in the phone.
It’s almost a flaw. It’s perhaps a misinterpreted requirement. What ever.

You just cannot install any themes or skins (more widely used) onto the phone MotoRazr2 V8 2GB. There are 3 themes that are provided by default and these are all that can be used.

Now this is a big disadvantage considering the fact that the display of the phone is so good and there cannot be any themes used on. All that can be done to customize the look of your phone is to change the wall paper.

That’s about the problem with the phone. But now lets explore the solutions to all these problems.

The curse or the Boon of internet - Every one wants everything on internet for free. Well this drives us to opening everything. Now phones.

Basically Motorola has a initiative of open source for its phones and I have seen the activity of these is pretty intense. There is everything available here - There are open source development forums, development projects, developer networks and even kernel packages for download of Motorola mobile phones like Razr2, Rokr etc - so many more. All model specific.

There are projects that happen on open source development and these also have public releases of the developed products.
For instance, the MotoRazr2 is a Linux based phone using Java technology. There are different projects that are identified and tracked in this initiative. The projects are released to the public.

Now there are other means as well.
There are public forums which gives away the full flashes of MotoRazr2 V8. Flashes replace the whole of the phones current firmware and all personal data will be lost.
And Re-Flashes replace only a part of the current firmware and generally the personal data is backed up.

These of course are flashes which are re-done to improve the existing features. As in the above example, the flashes could accommodate the phone to install skins on to the Razr2 V8.

Simple, Isn't it. Long live the Geeks.

Apart from these, the future, there are initiatives which try creating the Open phones from scratch. They even let you design your own at openmoko
of course there is the most heard about Open Handset Alliance Project - The Android. This is even put back the much awaited GPhone