The Motorola A780 is the second cellular

PDA PDA may refer to: Science and technology * Patron-driven acquisition, a mechanism for libraries to purchase books *Personal digital assistant, a mobile device * Photodiode array, a type of detector * Polydiacetylenes, a family of conducting poly ...

running the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

operating system. It was introduced in 2003 and sold in Europe and Asia.Motorola A780 on Softpedia
/ref> Some models include

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...

and navigation software.

Design

The Motorola A780 is a Linux-based smartphone. When the lid is closed, the phone appears like a traditional phone, with a keypad matrix and small display, actually a window to the larger display below the lid. When the lid is flipped open, a

QVGA The graphics display resolution is the width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height ar ...

touch screen is revealed that can be used with fingers or a supplied stylus.

Features

The phone is supplied with a number of applications including a POP and

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

email client, Opera web browser, calendar and a viewer for PDF and Microsoft Office files. Calendar and address book can be synchronized with a Microsoft Exchange or

SyncML SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) is the former name for a platform-independent information synchronization standard. The project is currently referred to as ''Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management''. The purpose o ...

server. The phone has a 1.3

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...

camera recording still and video images.

RealPlayer RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP ...

is included to play sound audio files and streamed audio and video. The phone has 48

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...

s of internal flash memory for storing user data and a slot for a

microSD Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

card. Both

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

and USB are provided for communication with another computer. Character entry is via an on-screen

QWERTY QWERTY () is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard ( ). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created f ...

keyboard and hand writing recognition. Models including a

receiver are supplied with ALK Technologies' CoPilot Live navigation software with street level maps of Europe.

Technical details

The phone has three processors: * Baseband Processor (BP) is an

ARM7TDMI ARM7 is a group of 32-bit reduced instruction set computer, RISC ARM architecture, ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use. The ARM7 core family consists of ARM700, ARM710, ARM7DI, ARM710a, ARM720T, ARM740T, ARM71 ...

that is used for the basic

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

phone functions. The necessary digital signal processing is performed by an Onyx (566xx)

DSP DSP may refer to: Computing * Digital signal processing, the mathematical manipulation of an information signal * Digital signal processor, a microprocessor designed for digital signal processing * Yamaha DSP-1, a proprietary digital signal ...

core. The BP runs the Nucleus operating system (produced by Mentor Graphics) from its own 32

MBit The megabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information. The prefix mega (symbol M) is defined in the International System of Units (SI) as a multiplier of 106 (1 million), and therefore :1 megabit = = = 1000 kilobits. The megabit h ...

Flash memory. * Application Processor (AP) is an Intel PXA270 with an ARMv5TE ARM core. This runs Linux, the user interface

Qtopia Qt Extended (named Qtopia before September 30, 2008) is an application platform for embedded Linux-based mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, video projectors and mobile phones. It was initially developed by Qt Software, ...

and the application programs. * Models with GPS use a Motorola MG4100 single chip GPS receiver integrated circuit. The Linux operating system used, ''EZX Linux'', is a modified version of

MontaVista MontaVista Software is a company that develops embedded Linux system software, development tools, and related software. Its products are made for other corporations developing embedded systems such as Automotive industry, automotive electronics ...

Consumer Electronics Linux 3.0

Linux enthusiasts

This phone is popular with Linux enthusiasts. It is able to establish a TCP/IP connection between the phone and another computer over USB or Bluetooth. One can then

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

to the phone and be presented with a

bash Bash or BASH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Bash!'' (Rockapella album), 1992 * ''Bash!'' (Dave Bailey album), 1961 * '' Bash: Latter-Day Plays'', a dramatic triptych * ''BASH!'' (role-playing game), a 2005 superhero game * "Bash" ('' ...

prompt. From the prompt one can, for example, mount an NFS drive(s) on the phone. The underlying operating system, Motorola EZX is Linux based, its kernel is open source. With the source code hosted on ''opensource.motorola.com'', it is possible to recompile and replace the kernel for this operating system. However Motorola did not publish a software development kit for native applications. Instead, they are expecting third party programs to be written in

Java ME Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, TV set-top ...

. The

OpenEZX OpenEZX was a project active from 2004 to 2008, which gathered information about the Linux based Motorola EZX phone platform. It tried to provide a 100% free software stack for those phones, especially a way to avoid any proprietary filesystem an ...

website is dedicated to providing free opensource software for this phone and others using the same OS.

References

External links

A780 entry in the OpenEZX Wiki
A780 Hardware details
Motorola Open source
Makes the Linux source code and drivers available in compliance with GPL * * Moto4Lin file manager and "seem" (customization) editor for A780 and others
Moto4Lin wiki A780 page
at

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...