The so-called iPhone killer

• Friday, April the 13th – pretty spooky day, isn't it? - the front page of digg.com contained an article called “Why the Linux based Deeda Pi phone is a real iPhone killer”. Of course, as usual, just the presence of a lowercase “i” next to an upper case letter caused a swarm of users to read this story and to comment on it. It seems there is a company, called Deeda which just released a (PDA) (mp3 player) (web browser) (everything, but the kitchen sink) contraption which can challenge the all-mighty Apple iPhone – planned to be released in June this year in the US. First of all, it's important to know that this ISN'T a phone and that it's called Deeda Pi and not the Deeda Pi Phone – that would make for too much of a pun wouldn't it? - as is has been thought by many. It does however provide all the other capabilities the iPhone has to offer, so there is room for comparison between the two.

  Here and here are a few pictures of the gadget. As you can see it closely resembles Apple's product , but without that “wow” factor involved. There is a video of the phone in action, but at the time of this writing the site is down due to too many hits (you can see the video here). What caused such a stir in the blogging community is that the operating system of Pi is based on open-source software – you can see the Firefox logo in the pictures. This made Linux enthusiasts say that it would surely be better than the iPhone. Apple fans replied, saying that Mac OS X is much better than any operating system. Then the Linux users from before reminded the others that Apple is based on a fork of BSD, so they should not forget where they came from. People started calling each other names and some even said that the pictures were photoshopped and that it's all one big prank. Steve Ballmer must have had a blast reading those comments – I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. Deeda claims they have been working on Pi since 2005 and that they didn't copy anything from the iPhone. If that is true or not remains a matter of debate and possibly a mater for Apple's legal team to handle. What's not a matter of debate is that lacking a mobile phone feature, Pi just doesn't quite do the trick and there surely are better projects such as the LG KS20 or Chris Kujawski's Blank phone. Still, the one feature that no gadget can beat is the open-source-ness – if you may – of the Deeda product, this being the sole reason why it got mentioned in this magazine. This allows the user to customize the system to his liking without braking any silly patent laws or licenses, it allows him to support the free software movement and it generally gives him a more clean conscience. In the end it's interesting to note the bad spelling: caculator and massage (instead of message). This is a bit weird indeed and really does make you raise an eyebrow or two...