[A12n-forum] Re: iPhone & the "both-and" dimension of ICT

[F Wolff <viool@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sa, 2007-01-20 at 21:06 +0530, Don Osborn wrote:
> The US newsweekly magazine Time (22 Jan. 2007) has an article on the new
> Apple "iPhone" handheld device ("The Apple of Your Ear"). It is very
> enthusiastic about the iPhone, but one passage reminded me of the idea that
> ICT is optimally has a "both-and" and positive-sum aspect. Note number 2 in
> the below quote:
> 

<snip>

For the purposes of this list it might be worthwhile to note that the
iPhone will apparently be an entirely closed device with no possibility
for communities to extend (for example to add extra fonts or input
methods). So it will only exhibit the "positive sum" over the sum of
things that Apple and licenced third parties feel like offering. It is
left as an exercise to the readers as to what this means for African
languages.

The iPhone therefore suffers the same problem that closed, proprietary
software poses. (Well, that is exactly what this is.)

Therefore I find the OpenMoko project far more interesting:
http://www.openmoko.com/

An announcement was recently made on their mailing list announcing the
roadmap for the Neo1973 phone:
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2007-January/001586.html

This phone will be an entirely open platform for people to innovate on,
and here, hopefully we will see the positive sum effect that were
mentioned. It will be built with Free Software based on a GNU/Linux
system.

This excites me as a possibility for many African language communities
(even minorities) to make the first cell phones available in their
languages. In the correspondence I had with the developer it seems that
standard (desktop) font libraries will be used with things like GTK+, so
I don't foresee any problems to display any languages that can already
be displayed in GTK+ programs.

I am not yet sure how text input will work in detail, apart from the
fact that it will also be driven by a touch screen instead of a keypad.
Time and cost allowing, I intend to make this phone work with the South
African languages with extended Latin characters (Afrikaans, Tswana,
Northern Sotho and Venda), and hopefully the work should be easy to port
to other languages.

Of course, we should realise that this device (and Apple's offering) is
an _extremely_ expensive device for most people (USA$350 plus shipping)
and in a way, still a toy for the elite. It is definitely not aimed to
be a phone for the masses of Africa. But hopefully we'll see a cheaper
model with a similar architecture that can benefit from the work by
communities on the Neo1973, just as the One laptop per child project now
benefits from the work by people who could afford expensive personal
computers.  Even so, in South Africa it seems that only the cheaper
phones are (sometimes) localised. This could then also be a "first" in
that it will be a smart phone that can hopefully be fully localised
(translated, input, display, etc.)  I guess the elite are also allowed
to have localised phones!