All in all, I think today's coworking crawl was a big success. After the last post, which I wrote in Jibbering Records in Moseley (nice coffee), we took the number 50 bus up into Digbeth and set up camp in Rooty Frooty (£1 pastries and lightening fast internet) at the Custard Factory. Despite the initial confusion about which electric sockets worked and which didn't, it was actually a pretty good place to work, with plenty of space and comfortable seating. We all settled down to some decent work at Rooty's, and stayed there for the rest of the day. Despite allegations of "coslacking" in the comments on my previous post, work did in fact take place; I managed to get a decent chunk of coding done.

Five of us took part over the day; Simon Hammond and Pete Ashton had already met up by the time I arrived in the morning, and stuck around all day. Mike Voong joined us for an hour or so at Jibbering Records, then we later met up with Stef Lewandowski, who was already at Rooty's when we arrived.

There's already talk of more events such as today, and some discussions took place about more semi-permanent homes for future coworking sessions. Keep tracking the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and keep your eye on the Birmingham coworking wiki for future occasions. All welcome!

Following the idea being mooted at the recent Birmingham bloggers meet-ups, today is the first decent attempt at coworking in Birmingham. I haven't blogged about the bloggers meet-ups myself, mainly since everyone else seems to have done a pretty good job themselves. I've only been to two out of the four meets so far, but they've been a nice informal gatherings of bloggers, social media people, journalists, techies and artists.

The basic idea of co-working is that people who often work alone from their laptops, from home or an office, get out, go somewhere else together and work in proximity to each other. Instigated with Simon Hammond, today we're having a co-working crawl of various cafes and other places offering free wireless internet around the city. We began over a hearty breakfast at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King's Heath, and are currently enjoying tea, coffee, chilled Afro music and free wifi at Jibbering Records in Moseley (who incidentially have computers running Ubuntu). Rooty Frooty at the Custard Factory is next...

If you want to track us, or come and join in, then follow the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and take a look at the Birmingham coworking wiki. I'll also be streaming the occasional live video on my newly created Bambuser channel.

For the last couple of months, I've been very fortunate and grateful to have been lent a Neo 1973 smartphone by Andy Loughran. Thanks Andy.

The Neo is the first piece of hardware which has been released by FIC, as part of the OpenMoko project. OpenMoko aims to create a fully free (as in freedom) mobile phone. Both harware specs and the software source code are free and open. So, what's it like?

Well, for a start, the thing runs Linux, which is rather cool and makes sense given how successful Linux has been on other small devices such as the Sharp Zaurus. The Neo is very obviously running Linux too, with the scrolling text boot-up screen Linux users will be famlilar with, from time to time hidden by a progress bar decorated splash screen. I decided not to put any real pictures or screenshots on this post, since none of the ones I tried came out very well, and there are lots of good examples on the net already, such as this video on YouTube and these pictures on Flickr. Zeth Green has also written about the OpenMoko software, and his post here has some great screenshots.

This is a project which I wholeheartedly support. Mobile phones are probably the last major area of modern personal computing-based technology which does not yet have a decent free software option. Indeed, since the phones are very often bought from the network operating companies themselves, the companies almost without exception impose some form of locking down on your phone. The extreme example is probably the iPhone, of which a friend of mine is currently having to downgrade the software, in order to get it to do what he wants. Apple has left no doubt as to its view on people having any kind of control over their own equipment. Other examples of locking down include non-optional firmware upgrades, tying you into one particular network and most importantly making it very difficult to develop your own software for the thing, in order to make it work in the way in which you want it to.

OpenMoko is changing this idea. Okay, but let's be honest, we're still not there yet. Whilst the hardware is virtually finished, the software is still really a work in progress. Power management, for example, is still quite broken, meaning that the phone won't go into standby mode properly and loses its entire battery in just a couple of hours. The phone is also quite a pain to charge, since it seems to go through phases of turning itself on and off repeatedly when it doesn't have much juice in it. These problems, of course, will be fixed in good time.

But these initial factors, whilst making the Neo unusable as an everyday phone at present, cannot rain on the parade that is the achievement in bringing really good free smartphone software into the world. The OpenMoko software suite looks nice, being based on GTK+, the widgets used in GNOME, and works well for the most part. The phone's touchscreen makes it feel more like a PDA than a normal phone, but I guess that perceptions will change with more and more touchscreen phones being invented, such as the aforementioned iPhone. There are small usability problems to be sorted out, like the touchscreen keyboard requiring accuracy the likes of only Robin Hood possess with the stylus, in order to enter words. Nevertheless, it's easy to see how this will be a major player in the phone market once it is finalised.

The OpenMoko software will run not only on the Neo 1973, but also on many other phones, according to the OpenMoko project. It's easy to predict a scenario where OpenMoko can be installed on pretty much any phone, rather like how Rockbox can be installed on pretty much any music player. This has to be a good thing.

And in case this wasn't enough, there's also the Qtopia smartphone software, also open source, being developed by Trolltech, the Noweigian company who develop QT, the libraries upon which KDE is based. While OpenMoko will look familiar to GNOME users, KDE users will probably feel more at home with Qtopia, and it looks just as good. The Qtopia software, which has been primarily developed for their reference platform, the Greenphone, is perhaps a little closer to release quality at present, and can, as mentioned, be installed easily on the Neo.

All this flexibility, in my opinion, hails a fantastic, revolutionary time for our now ubiquitous mobile phones. Pretty soon, we will all have the choice not only of which phone to use, but also of which software to run on it, regardless of hardware or network. We'll be able to extend it, modify it, and share our work with the community. The success of the free software model has really been demonstrated through many hugely successful projects. When the ability to improve stuff is open to anyone, it seems, all sorts of possibilities come into play and things get better. Just take a look at this video showing someone running the KDE 4 desktop, Plasma on the Neo, merely a couple of weeks after its release, and this one of Enlightenment E17 running on it.

OpenMoko is a great start, the Neo is quite a cool looking phone, Qtopia is coming along really well, and with projects like KDE embracing PDAs and phones as part of its cross-platform approach (see my post on KDE 4), the future looks very bright for free and open phones. Arguably the KDE vs GNOME desktop competition has been a good driver of free unix-based desktop systems, and it seems we won't be able to escape that particular war even on our mobile phones.

Anyway, flame wars and trolling aside, I'm looking forward to the freedom to choose.