As for feeling guilty for taking easy shots – shoot away. I enjoy the challenge and opportunity to flex my cognitive muscles!

Oh, and you’re still a fanboy!

To be honest I’m getting alittle annoyed at people using the term “iphone alternative” to every smartphone that comes on the market. ( or says it is coming on the market, at some point, in the future, maybe. ) Especially if you cant actually even fullfill the “phone” part of the equation.

It is nice though to see that this one at least has a touch screen which is better than alot of other phones being touted.

And for the record I think the iphone itself could seriously use some feature upgrades such as MMS.

“Vapourware – Any product that has been announced but hasnt actually seen the light of day.” – Tobes.

You might have made that call based on the fact that the device cannot currently be used to its full extent immediately, and the GTA02 might never materialise, but the same could be said for any new piece of software on SourceForge in aplha status. The software is under development and is not suitable for use in a production environment. It is not, however, vapourware.

As for it’s aesthetics, it’s not as slick as the iPhone, and has a somewhat baby-toy look, but then again, I doubt it had the amount of money spent on it that the Apples of this world can afford to plough in to product design.

I’m not sure that it will gain a huge consumer following in the short term, not only because they won’t have the marketing budget, but also because it doesn’t have the style that the materialistic consumers of today demand. In the medium- to long-term, it has a chance of gaining traction once developers produce third-party additions that will make this more flexible and supportive than other phones.

Consider the iPhone again – the only way you can add applications at present is by writing widgets (small, self-contained web pages). You can only write helper applications – nothing that can actually interact with the phone other than through a set number of API calls. Other phones are similar, only allowing you to run Java applets with the same limitations. The Neo1973 allows you to install any application written in C that uses the open X windows system and GTK toolkit, which gives you much more control and opens up the market to a more diverse range of applications.

True, most of the last paragraph will only mean anything to developers and hackers, but the results of that openness will positively impact future generations of 1973 owners, whether technically aware or not.

It annoys me that people can just disregard a new device on the market based on looks, but I realise your comment is probably an off-the-cuff remark from an Apple fanboy

Ugly Vapourware at that