First impressions of Openmoko Neo FreeRunner
Recently I bought a defected FreeRunner from eBay, the articles description just said, that it had stopped starting up some days ago. I wouldn't have bought it, if it wouldn't have been quite cheap: I won the auction and had to pay ~53 euros including shipping—I had seen another defected FreeRunner with a similar defect priced far higher after all.
I was (of course) excited to get it. When it arrived one day after my G1, I had to take it out of its box immediately. Turned out that it really didn't start. So I connected it to the wall charger, in order to charge the battery. Didn't start, still. Finally, I wired one of my Motorola batteries to it, and guess what: I got a weird looking image on the screen.
So I thought: Maybe something happened while flashing the device and flashing failed. I asked for help at #openmoko on freenode, and i was told to try to enter the NOR boot loader. So I pressed and held the AUX button before the power button, but: From that what I saw on the screen, i had to consider, that even the NOR flash boot loader was broken and a debug board necessary.
The next morning I decided to open the upper part of the FreeRunner, just to have a look at the JTAG connector. And what did I see? The AUX button was broken. Well, actually it still is, as I don't have a soldering iron—but i will have one pretty soon.
Last night I've then been playing with my FreeRunner, had a look at an older version of Qtopia/Qt Extended (which was actually installed on flash), played with SHR unstable, FSO stable and Android (one build from panicking, and now the koolu beta3).
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/1-openmoko-and-htc-dream.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/1-openmoko-and-htc-dream.c7240fdb09334c48.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/2-openmoko-defect.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/2-openmoko-defect.100ca0b3851b6a4a.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/3-openmoko-bootloader.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/3-openmoko-bootloader.2e87a26499776988.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/4-openmoko-bootloader-2.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/4-openmoko-bootloader-2.a51a6434b5d7cf98.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/5-openmoko-shr-illume-launcher.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/5-openmoko-shr-illume-launcher.a0e45c45d0c63600.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/6-openmoko-shr-midori.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/6-openmoko-shr-midori.ea4c77558d1986ce.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/7-openmoko-shr-power-manager.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/7-openmoko-shr-power-manager.4c2146f020016fa1.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/8-openmoko-android-lockscreen.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/8-openmoko-android-lockscreen.7bf34f6275fb5c3d.jpg)
![/2009-02-17-first-impressions-of-openmoko-neo-freerunner/9-openmoko-android-settings.jpg](https://linmob.net/processed_images/9-openmoko-android-settings.f295e0a5f0b73b41.jpg)
I will write more about my experiences with these distributions soon—currently I don't have the time to do so.
(The real reason for this post is to show my happiness that I was able to find the (and maybe solve) problem.)