iPhone vs. Openmoko

Two days ago, my office mate received his Openmoko-based mobile phone. First thing he told me about it was that is wasn’t quite ready for the general public : “yeah, you need to run the ‘date’ command from the console to set its internal clock”. At first, all you have is the ability to make and receive phone calls and… a console. And apparently that’s about it. After about an hour he said “ok, it’s finally connected to the guest WiFi, I can ssh to it now”. At the same time, by some strange coincidence, I came across this blog post linked from the Linux Hater’s Blog (which I wholeheartedly recommend – so far I’ve yet to find a single article which I couldn’t link to my own experience with Linux). I read the first few lines of the post to my office mate and he agreed : “yeah, I figure it will take me about a week to set it up completely”.