On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 06:14:09PM +0100, Cliff wrote:

I've been extremely entertained by the traffic on this list (in fact we're desparate for software engineers and the work some of you have achieved would definitely qualify you for a top spot on our consideration list!).

Heh. I'd noticed Amstrad had been looking at the list and wondered if we were ever going to hear anything from them. :)

Anyway, what we're thinking of doing is selling an "open" Linux development board based on the E3.

...

As in-house experiments we've even got things like QT/E, Opera and Skelmir JVM ported to it and have worked on stuff like 802.11g too so it's very easy to run a whole host of apps on the thing (nothing necessarily to do with telephony - could be anything "Linux" really). It'd come pre-loaded with the Montavista 2.4.18 kernel, busybox, etc and it's quite a simple process to use a USB-ethernet adaptor on it and NFS mount to a Redhat (or similar) server. You can also log on via a serial terminal or telnet into it. It makes for a very neat little Linux development environment. Naturally, if we did this, we WOULD give you access to the source for things like the 2.4.18 kernel and our Nand, LCD, keyboard driving stuff. We probably couldn't offer much in the way of support though.

That would be nice; with access to the NAND code it should hopefully be possible to use something like JFFS2 instead, giving a writable file system. Plus it would help with getting the kernel updated to 2.6 - I know Vince Sanders has been talking about trying to get better OMAP support in the mainline kernel.

However, the one thing we couldn't do would be to sell it for -L-49 because the phone is sold at a loss that we only recover through ongoing usage. However we'd hope that we might be able to do this for around the original E3 price.

That's £100, isn't it? Or was it originally sold for more than that?

At the moment this is just an idea and whether we put the effort into doing it is really based on developer feedback as to whether you'd be interested? Please contact me and let me know what you think.

Do I think you'd sell these for £100? Certainly, especially if it was packaged nicely. I bought an E3 for the purposes of hacking on partly due to the fact that the idea of decent SIP/IAX phone appealed. You'd probably find others who felt the same way and who would buy something in the style of the E3 but without the Amstrad proprietary software but a development environment instead.

Personally, it's unlikely I'd buy a developer model at the start - not because I don't want one, just that it's hard to justify even more toys at present. :)

J.