Back in January 2007, two revolutionary cell phones caught my attention.

One was the iPhone, now in its second incarnation as the iPhone 3G. The iPhone was locked down by Apple and by an exclusive contract with AT&T. No one could develop applications for it but Apple, no one could offer it for sale but AT&T. Yes, unlocked iPhones sprang up everywhere as did rogue apps for “jailbroken” iPhones, but that wasn’t Apple’s intent.

The second, which you may have never heard of, was the NEO1973. The NEO was to be an unconstrained cell phone built around an open source platform – a derivative of Linux called OpenMoko. The NEO1973 was to be a quad-band phone with a high rez touchscreen, built-in GPS and plenty of horsepower inside its small Dove-soapbar shaped enclosure.

It was to be the phone that would set us free of greedy carriers, a phone anyone, anywhere could develop apps for without getting anyone’s permission or using anyone’s application store.

It was, in short, the anti-iPhone.

Back then I was rooting for the plucky NEO. I even considered buying a developers’ edition just to see what could be done with such a mobile, open device. Then delays started to plague the software development, and the hardware and the little NEO fell off my radar screen.

Fell off, that is, until recently when John Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball pointed me to a video demonstration of the finally released NEO’s interface. The video features the NEO FreeRunner now available for sale, and hackable to beat-the-band. Unfortunately it is a phone/mobile platform only a hacker could love.

Two years ago I thought being the anti-iPhone was a compliment. Now, not so much. From demonstrations I’ve seen online, the interface is embarrassing awful, slow and, really, unusable. The keyboard on the NEO is so small you have to use a stylus to type on it and, even then, the thick bezel on the side of the screen makes hitting certain keys all but impossible even with a sharp point.

Physical buttons are placed in ergonomically awkward positions, the drop down menus are slow and the screen scrolling is lethargic and unresponsive. This would be a phone you would use as a prop in a comedy sketch about bad Russian Cold War products.

And, unfortunately, for me it is a good example of why I’m not a huge fan of the open source movement. Very often, this is what you get: a NEO instead of an iPhone.

I mean, God love open source folks. Their hearts are in the right place but, man, a lot of open source software is the worst looking, unusable junk I’ve ever seen this side of a Microsoft Windows ME hack-a-thon.

Up until recently Ubuntu has been okay until you have to do something really useful with it, like make wireless work on a laptop. And GIMP, a popular open source photo editor is to Photoshop what an elephant is to Martha Graham. And the aging, bloated Photoshop is no prize in the user interface department itself.

Like it or not, an elegant, responsive and insanely popular device like the iPhone could only come from a company that controls the hardware and software and has its eye on design, elegance and user experience first. It is the product of obsessive artists, not obsessive engineers. It is the product of a top down environment where one guy, Steve Jobs, calls the shots. I don’t like that, I wish it were different but, as Leander Kahney argues in his book Inside Steve’s Brain, that’s the way it is.

I really wanted the NEO to succeed. Philosophically I’m all for open source software and hardware, when it makes sense. And, as a couple of my Twitter pals have pointed out, I shouldn’t dismiss the entire open source movement because of one or two failures. I don’t mean to, I’m just pointing to a trend even though its equivalent to telling a mother her child is dumb and homely.

I think the NEO is destined to be the Lego Mindstorms of cell phones – a tinkerer’s toy.

Unfortunately, tinkerers’ toys don’t set us free, they just give us something to do with our free time.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...