I bought a Neo Freerunner when it came out. I tried make it my daily phone, and invested a lot of time hacking on it - in the end a wasted effort. There were

I bought a Neo Freerunner when it came out. I tried make it my daily phone, and invested a lot of time hacking on it - in the end a wasted effort. There were show-stopper bugs and face-palm-worthy design missteps at every level of the stack. Its developer community was fragmented among a half-dozen different distros from birth; Openmoko themselves forked their own distro so that even if you wanted to run the "official" one, you had two incompatible choices - and neither the two "official" distros, nor any of the user-developed ones, supported all of the hardware + apps necessary to actually use this thing as a phone. (I.e. one might have audio but not support making calls; another might support making calls but no audio volume; a third might lose all your contacts, etc.) If we could have taken the union of features from all these distros, it could have had a great smartphone OS; that just goes to show what gratuitous fragmentation cost us. As for hardware, we were screwed from both sides by the hardware companies (flaky drivers) and Openmoko's own circuit design. Due to driver/card incompatibility, I never found a high capacity SD card which would work completely reliably in the phone; only the cramped 512MB SD card which came with the phone worked reliably. Mind you most of the time the problem would show up after you spent a few hours compiling & setting up Gentoo or whatever on a new 8GB SD card only to have the 3rd boot fail with a corrupted card. And in the circuit design side, from the specific problems the phone's board had, I get the feeling Openmoko's engineers were computer engineers but not very knowledgeable in audio electronics. They failed to properly separate and route the audio ground, nor to give a good range of audio volumes, and connections for the mixer chip were a mess. Actually, electrical noise was a problem in other areas, as well; accessing the SD card generated noise or RF leakage which would cause the GPS unit to lose it's lock. (So good luck loading a map while navigating.) Interference in bandwidth (albeit just in contention for buses, not actually noise) was also responsible for the limitation of not being able to use the SD card and talk to the video processor at full rate at the same time - so playing video from the card was not workable, either. I had some fun with the device, learned a little bit, and ultimately rebuilt it into a larger case with a larger battery and an amplifier for the earpiece. However, I would have been better served if I had done all these things on a development board, rather than being tricked into buying a prototype development board shaped like a phone. The experience led to me "missing the boat" on getting into mobile development; it took a long time for me to get another smartphone, because I had blown my money and my efforts on the freerunner. For the next couple years whenever I would consider getting another smartphone my then-wife (now ex) would counter "yeah that's what you said when you wanted to buy the freerunner - and you have that and you don't even use it!"