Avant Gaming:
avant-gaming
-noun
1. an advanced group in game design whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods.
-adjective
1. of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of games and play styles.
2. unorthodox or daring game designs; radical.

Archive for the ‘openmoko’ Category


Did Android kill OpenMoko?

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Google vs. OpenMoko 2As I’m finally getting down to reviewing the Google’s mobile Android SDK, I’m wondering if this is the nail in the coffin for OpenMoko (it isn’t a very big coffin and would only need 1 nail).

My thinking is this: I’ve been working on a appropriative /pervasive game toolkit, and have been holding off on moving into the dev stage until I had a chance to get my hands on the consumer version of the Neo1973 to what I could really do with it. The fact that the device has been continuously delayed has not helped OpenMoko in this case.

You might ask why would I even bother with OpenMoko in the first place. Well the pervasive game toolkit requires a fairly high level of API access to a device’s hardware functionality. While I realized that any OpenMoko version of the toolkit would only be demoware, I was prepared to use it until the mobile community came to their senses.

Now it appears that Google may have lead them there. I’m putting a lot of stock into the optional low-level hardware APIs that have yet to be released but based on what I am reading now, it looks Android will allow me to have my demoware and deploy it too.

…I still might get a Neo1973 when it is finally available, but I certainly won’t be developing for it.

Did Android cause anyone else to close the book on OpenMoko or am I the only one who ever bothered to open the book?