Samsung Omnia: A phone suitable for (Linux) hacking?

Samsung is currently shipping a phone called Omnia, or more precisely, the SGH-i900. It is a touch screen only phone shipping with Windows Mobile. Recently at Mobile World Congress, Samsung has shown that there is a LiMo port to the Omnia. Obviously, this port is not available publicly, so there's no easy way to just re-flash any other Omnia.

However, as it seems some folks at xda-developers.com have booted a generic PXA3xx kernel on the device, which shows us two things: One, there appears to be no cryptographic lockdown, i.e. we can execute what we want on the CPU. Second, that at least a core kernel with framebuffer is already working.

I did some more research today, and put most of the findings at this page in the gnufiish wiki. Among other things, apparently a service manual has leaked, containing schematics excerpts, component placement and similar useful information. I've linked various data sheets of components that are used in the device.

As it seems, the big unknown part is the GSM Modem interface. It uses dual-ported RAM to communicate with a Qualcomm MSM6281 3.5G modem. Now maybe the shared memory protocol is similar or even the same to what Android/HTC/Google G1 uses. At least typically, if you roll out an architecture of a chipset like the 3.5G chipset, then all members of that architecture are likely to speak more or less the same protocol. Of course this is just guesswork, it yet remains to be confirmed.

With some luck I should receive one of those devices soon to do my share of reverse engineering.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the upcoming weekend, where Stefan Schmidt and myself will try to finally get the SPI based 3G/3.5G modem interface of the E-TEN glofiish devices implemented on Linux.