Tale of Two Phones

By now, the whole world knows about the iPhone, Apple's first stab at the mobile phone business.

Not even on sale yet, the phone has stirred up a feeding frenzy in the press on the strength of Apple's remarkable success with the iPod and Steve Jobs' legendary marketing skills. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has promised a revolutionary product that will shake the industry, and most of us are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, there are niggling details.

Like the iPod, the iPhone will have no replaceable battery. This may be acceptable on an MP3 player but less so on a cellphone. Also like the iPod, the iPhone is designed to be a closed system. At least in the beginning, there will be no third-party applications on the iPhone.

Almost the exact opposite is the Neo1973, a phone you've probably never even heard of, from a Taiwanese company called FIC, better known for making computers and PC motherboards.

Relative obscurity isn't the only thing that sets the Neo1973 apart, however.

Unlike the iPhone and most other mobile handsets in the market, the Neo1973 smart phone uses open source software developed on a platform called OpenMoko. In this sense, it is even more revolutionary than the iPhone.

"For the first time, the mobile ecosystem will be as open as the PC, and mobile applications equally as diverse and more easily accessible," said Sean Moss-Pultz, architect of OpenMoko and a product manager at FIC. "Ringtones are already a multi-billion dollar market. We think downloading mobile applications on an open platform will be even bigger."

These expectations are by no means a sure thing. Service providers, long accustomed to subsidizing phones that can be set to lock out their competitors, may not welcome an open source phone that anyone can hack.

The first fully supported OpenMoko phone, the Linux-based Neo1973 is expected to start shipping in March. Based on information available on the OpenMoko Web site (http://www.openmoko.com), the Neo1973 will be a touch-screen, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone with a Global Positioning System chip and Bluetooth built in, and sell for about $350. It will have no camera, but it will have a replaceable battery and a micro-SD slot for extra memory.

Pictures of prototypes show a sleek, modern phone.

In the beginning, the Neo1973 is more likely to appeal to hackers and geeks, but the OpenMoko Team doesn't want to stop there.

In a post on the OpenMoko list, Moss-Pultz expounds on the philosophy behind going open in a proprietary industry.

"Mobile phones are closed environments created with a mobile context in mind," he writes. "But this concept is limiting; a mobile phone has the potential to be a platform that can do anything that a small computer with broadband access can do. If mobile phones were based on open platforms, they would have the potential to bring computing to people in a ways traditional computers cannot. Mobile phones can become ubiquitous computers."

He also explains that the Neo1973 got its name from the year that Dr. Marty Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone, made the first call.

"We believe that an open source mobile phone can revolutionize, once again, the world of communication," Moss-Pultz concludes. "This will be the New 1973. Join us. 'Free Your Phone.'"

Nobody knows if OpenMoko will succeed, but right out of the gate, it sounds more revolutionary than yet another closed-system phone, even if it has the letter "i" in front of it.