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Donating my HTC Touch Pro (raph100)

written by Mickey on 2009-11-23

I bought the HTC Touch Pro some months ago in order to port the freesmartphone.org middleware to it and help to raise an end-user distro. While things began very optimistic (i.e. the modem support was completed after just a few weeks), it came to a relative halt pretty soonish afterwards -- because of missing kernel support. Google releasing the kernel source code for the HTC Dream has enabled the HTClinux folks to quickly come up with some very impressive results, but due to the heavy differences in the baseband firmware it did not spare them from carrying out an amazing pile of reverse engineeering -- just like every other anti-vendor-port.

While these guys truly have done great work, I personally think it's not going anywhere soon -- at least not to a point where we have an open GNU/Linux on competitive hardware fully supporting all peripherals of the device. Showstoppers are always Bluetooth, Wifi, Sound, Suspend/Resume, and all the other things where Google didn't care about standard mainline interfaces, but rather decided to put the meat into userland -- stowed away behind a "safe" closed source license.

Anyways, this hope/dream/experiment has ended, hence I'm offering to donate my HTC Touch Pro (raph100) to one of the HTClinux kernel hackers as a last act of supporting this anti-vendor-port. If you think you are qualified, drop me a mail. Meanwhile, I'll continue supporting the Openmoko devices and concentrate on the Palm Pre.