Monthly Archives Mai 2013

Javier Agüera von Geeksphone im Interview

Der 20-jährige Javier Agüera ist CTO und Mitgründer von Geeksphone, dem Anbieter, der uns die ersten Firefox OS basierten Handys in Form eines Developer Previews spendiert hat. Bemerkenswert ist, dass Javier das Unternehmen bereits im zarten Alter von 16 gegründet hat. Die ersten vertriebenen Geräte waren Android-basiert. Er und sein 12-köpfiges Team sind aus mehreren Gründen überzeugt, dass Firefox OS am Markt bestehen kann:

  • Mozilla hat bereits eine existierende Developer Community
  • Es gibt Support von Hardware- und Chip-Produzenten (bspw. Qualcomm)
  • Die Operator unterstützen es sehr stark (bspw. Telefonica)

Besonders sympathisch ist auch sein Zugang zum Business: „Working step by step and with a small portion of the cake it is enough for doing our things and innovating the market and delivering new experiences. That´s all about.“

 

via The Next Web

Geeksphone Peak unboxing & kurzer Blick auf Firefox OS

Große Freude! Ich habe gestern das Geeksphone Peak mit Firefox OS erhalten. Ich hatte am vorangegangenen Dienstag im Geeksphone Online-Shop um 8.00 Uhr früh bestellt. Die Webseite hat eine Fehlermeldung wegen zu vieler offener MySQL-Transaktionen angezeigt, ich konnte den Vorgang aber abschließen. Offenbar war das Kontigent an verfügbaren Geräten nicht allzu groß, denn der Shop war abends (wie es hieß) „für Wartungsarbeiten“ down und beinahe Tags darauf komplett ausverkauft. Zur Zeit sind die beiden Developer Preview Geräte nach wie vor „out of stock“. Deshalb bin ich umso erfreuter eines ergattert zu haben! Um, wie ich meine, diesen großen Moment gebührend zu feiern, habe ich mich über mein erstes Unboxing-Video gemacht und ein bißchen Firefox OS erkundet. Ich freue mich über Feedback direkt auf youtube oder hier in den Kommentaren.

 

Flashing Geeksphone Peak with stable image using fastboot

Update 12.11.2015:

  • Geeksphone stopped operations in 2015 and therefore does not provide any new images anymore. Neither Mozilla does provide any images but it lists the Peak as one of the Firefox OS devices on their community site. You currently find a link there to http://www.gerloni.net/gp-peak where you can download a nightly build of Firefox OS 2.5. As you might guess a nightly build can be buggy.
  • When you connect your Peak to your computer you might check whether it is attached. You can do so by entering adb devices which will show attached devices or an error.
  • Instead of entering all commands listed at point 6. you can simply run flash which does all of them at once. Remember: your previous data is wiped.
  • You can install Android 4.0.4 if you were unhappy with Firefox OS or simply curious. You find the link to the Android image here.
  • In case the drivers are not installed and you are on a Windows 8 or 10 machine have a look how to install unsigned drivers.

I was lucky enough to try to flash my Geeksphone Peak for the first time with a nightly build (following the official step-by-step guide at http://downloads.geeksphone.com/drivers/Manual_flash_geeksphone-eng.txt) and to do it with the buggy nightly build from May 29th. My display was distorted and I was desperate because I couldn´t find an easy solution to this particular problem. Since I could not see anything, I could not turn on the USB Debugging Mode and flash the device with adb. However, combining the insights of two posts (http://forum.geeksphone.com/index.php?topic=5229.0 and http://forum.geeksphone.com/index.php?topic=5245.0) made my day and I could flash the Peak with the latest stable image:

  1. Download the latest stable release at http://downloads.geeksphone.com/peak/latest.html and unpack it
  2. (I guess on a Windows machine you will need the USB drivers from http://downloads.geeksphone.com/drivers/usb_driver.zip installed but you will already have done that since you distorted your display too)
  3. Connect your Peak via USB to your PC
  4. Start the device into bootloader mode to listen to fastboot connections by powering it up while pressing Vol+ and Vol- keys at the same time.
  5. Open the shell in Linux or the command line in Windows (cmd.exe) and move to the directory where you unpacked the ZIP of the build
  6. Run the following commands (adb does not work, you have to use fastboot!):
    • fastboot flash boot boot.img
    • fastboot flash system system.img
    • fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
    • fastboot reboot

The Peak reboots with the latest stable image! Yeah! I hope this might help someone who was lucky like me 😉