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Getting a Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone mobile phone
Posted by JLP on August 14th, 2007
I just got an e-mail with some great news. It looks like I am among the lucky ones who are selected to receive a grant under the Qtopia Greenphone Innovation Grant program. This means that I will soon get a full Greenphone mobile phone SDK, with the phone itself, connector cables and development tools. Greenphone is one of those mobile phones of the new generation which are based on an open platform. Another well known example from the new generation is OpenMoko. Apple iPhone on the other hand still belongs to the old closed platform generation.
And why will I get Greenphone? Well it looks like judges from Trolltech found my proposal for a new mobile phone application interesting. In this rather short time (submission deadline is October 31) I will try to create a free and open source mobile phone client for playing turn-based 4X space strategy games which are based on servers and the protocol of Thousand Parsec project. A C++ library for the protocol is already available and I hope I’ll be able to reuse it as much as possible. If all goes well most of the work will involve the user interface and use of the C++ protocol library. The work will also be of use with my other project, which is to create a game client for KDE 4 desktop, which heavily uses Qt toolkit and framework, which is very similar to Qtopia used on the mobile phone and other mobile devices.
Can’t wait until postman brings me the package. In the meantime I should start reading more about Qtopia development. I also need to come up with a name for the game and the way a user would interact with it. Any suggestions are welcome.
August 15th, 2007 at 05:13:39
This is so cool, and that they think a turn based game is deserving of some prototyping on the device right now is interesting, probably means they’re thinking outside the box. I wonder if Windows Mobile team would do that?
I first heard about the Greenphone project when i blogged about it last October, and I promptly forgot about it figuring it was just more pie in the sky from the linux advocates. Looks like I’m gonna be proven wrong…again!
I’ll subscribe to your feed and track your progress here, keep us informed.
Congrats!
August 15th, 2007 at 09:04:59
[...] looking forward to JLP’s progress reports on how his project is going. He’s already soliciting input for ideas such as how best to interact with the game via the phone, [...]
August 15th, 2007 at 16:29:29
Andy, yeah I was also very surprised when I got the e-mail. I still can’t believe it’s true. BTW, Google is also sponsoring open source 4X space strategy game development by selecting 3 students to work on Thousand Prasec for the Google Summer of Code program. This is some very great news for a 4X games fan like me.
Oh by the way, thank you very much for the article and link on Geeknews. I’ll try to blog as much as possible about how this adventure goes. It will be my very first time programming for a cell phone.