Hi,
After all, it would be the first mobile phone that he himself would be able to use, given that there is no proprietary software on the baseband anymore.
Well, if you're extremist about it, there is still the DSP. Not much we can do about it without making our own ASIC tough :p
Here in Morocco, I've had some further discussion on the topic face to face with him, and he is sort of unhappy with the fact that nobody is working on making an actual self-contained phone (no matter how simple or limited in features) that can be used by a regular user as 'just a phone'.
Well, even if we have reached major milestones (IMHO) and are able to make actual phone calls, there is still a bunch of things missing even for voice / SMS and reliability problems in some cases.
Besides the UI there is also a lot of things that need to be done to be usable as a phone, like being able to charge the battery, or at least not drain it in a few hours by having all chips fully powered on all the time.
e will try to draft a similar job description related to MS-side GPRS support (L1, RLC/MAC, ..). That would be yet another area where we would appreciate some contribution, and which eventually be important beyond our existing voice telephony capabilities.
The RLC/MAC layer can certainly be useful for a lot of reasons (both MS and BTS side), but is anyone seriously gonna use GPRS non-edge ?
Cheers,
Sylvain