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I've got one of these:
http://koolu.com/Koolu-WE-Appliance/Works-Everywhere-Appliance.html

Geode is a bit underpowered but for a file server and torrent daemon, it's plenty enough. Comes with an internal 80gb hdd but can also boot from usb, btw 4 usb ports is really great. Fanless and uses less than 10 watts! It also comes with ubuntu pre installed.

You might need to buy a dev phone if you want to do kernel development, but hey, that's much better than just about any other platform I've seen. {...} But you can still do that with the dev phone if you really need to.

OpenMoko (and Koolu - the Android-based version of the same FreeRunner hardware) don't need to have a separate "dev" phone. Everything is doable on the main phone.
So yes, indeed, you can always find "more free" elsewhere.

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Though thankfully, the business model in sereval European country (including here in Switzerland) make it so you don't need a locked phone. You don't actually buy a subsidized phone *from* a service provider.

You go to any supermarket or store which sells phones. There you buy or extend a previous service plan with a provider of your choice and the service provider gives you a rebate (amount variable depending on the service) you can use to buy any phone of your choice in the same store. The phone isn't locked. You can pretty much do anything you want with it and the provider doesn't give a damn about it. You can keep the phone and use it with the service you just bought. You can give the phone away as a present to your girlfriend and let her use it with her service or pre-paid SIM. As long as you pay the monthly subscription of your service, the provider is happy with this.

Thus, you can find computer shops happy to sell you the service you want with a non-locked Android phone. Be it the HTC Dream, the HTC Magic or the Samsung I7500 (I didn't know about that one until I found it in the shop's catalog).

In fact in several jurisdiction, selling a phone tied and locked to a unique provider is illegal under monopoly laws (France was mentioned on /. some time ago).

This will help getting non-locked phone faster over there I hope. And I hope most Android-based phone maker will be intelligent enough to release non-locked phone which can also be developed on. i.e.:
- a special USA edition with everything locked on
- a special dev (sold in EU too) edition with nothing locked on
(and not a seperate third EU edition without service provider lock BUT kernel upgrades still locked).

Koolu = Android on the FreeRunner
a developer's blog
I haven't tried it yet, but to quote that blog,

we can call the android beta3 release not yet fully functional ready, but maybe the next release will contain a working messaging system. And from that moment, We could say the Android has the same working features as the other FreeRunner distributions.

Which would still not make it a usable phone, but there's hope.

.

I'm running the openmoko Android version from Sean McNeil (check out openmoko's wiki) in dual boot mode, along with Qtopia and it shows promise too, though I think koolu's team of devs will likely reach a optimized distro quicker. Comparing both the G1 and Freerunner, Android runs faster on the G1 (of course), where as the Freerunner has the ArmV4 compatibility issue (DOH!) and the lack of keyboard (all OM touchscreen keyboards fail at this current time).

You can get the phone in Canada RIGHT NOW, you don't have to hack it like an iPhone or beg someone in the USA to send you one like the G1, and it is completely open source so there is no stupid EULA's to get in the way.

You know, in some ways that phone is real appealing... Particularly the whole "hackable" aspect. In other ways it looks like complete garbage, at both the hardware and software levels... I have trouble these days getting past the lack of a keyboard. I mean, I was a Palm fan until they decided to stop meaningfully improving the OS, so I'm down with pen computing - but I've also been using a Treo 650 for a couple years now, and I use that built-in keyboard all the time. I hate the idea of being without that.

I would be all over the G1, personally - except I hate the idea of a mobile device that doesn't allow you to develop and install native code. I don't like the idea of a Linux system that can't run "bash", or run the same software I run on my Linux machine at home... And I don't like the whole idea of my phone having to waste cycles converting one instruction set to another. I've had enough of that on the Treo with PACE.

Of course I recognize the benefits of a virtual environment for sandboxing, and of an API that's really designed for phone use... But to me the point of running Linux on a device is to be able to do Linuxy things with it...

All this is almost enough to make me turn to Windows Mobile - it doesn't require everything to go through an emulation layer like Android does, its operating software is a lot more mature than OpenMoko, you can get decent hardware for it (sliding keyboards, etc.)... Basically, it's still more of a "portable computer" system adapted to work as a phone (like PalmOS on the Treo) rather than "high-functionality phone" system like Android...

Why they gotta make this so hard? Android looks great except the whole "Linux appeal" is negated by the fact that you apparently can't actually get at it...

You can get the phone in Canada RIGHT NOW, you don't have to hack it like an iPhone or beg someone in the USA to send you one like the G1, and it is completely open source so there is no stupid EULA's to get in the way.

I've run qtopia/QtExtend, 2008.2 and debian (dual booted) on my Freerunner and aside from the hassles of not having full h/w functionality and 3G (working on USB 3G integration), open source phones are looking real exciting for 2009.

there's a good chance Android will run on the Freerunner.

So much of a good chance in fact that Koolu is committing to shipping their FreeRunners with Android installed starting in November.

It's clearly someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. For one, FIC are not a Windows PC maker, but a PC maker. They make the ION 604 mini PC that is sold under various names, particularly Koolu and Linutop, which is sold either as a diskless thin client or with a 2.5" HD with a Linux distribution. It's based on the AMD Geode chip, and will run practically any x86 OS as long as there are drivers - I've put a standard out of the box Ubuntu distribution onto one which worked perfectly except for the sound (which was annoying as I was trying to make a networked music player).
To say that OpenMoko is a 'Windows Mobile' phone is therefore specious. It's an ARM device that can run Windows Mobile or anything else that can be compiled for its chipset. HTC are about to follow suit and turn one of their models into an Android (read Linux and whatever the Android platform adds) phone. It has been possible, if not easy, to port Linux to their devices for a long time, but I think that that is the nature of the mobile phone/PDA platform in general.
The question of compatibility with GPS and GSM hardware was discussed last year in various places. My feeling was that the nature of the mobile phone system would make it difficult for an 'open' telephone device to be truly open and that the best that could be done would be to talk to 'black box' implementations of GSM and maybe even GPS by squirting AT codes into sealed chipsets to prevent too much openness. Phone companies are notoriously protective about what crosses their networks, which was why I wondered aloud whether compromises would have to be made with OpenMoko. So far it would appear to be not, but it would also appear that there is going to be a fair amount of SIM-swapping and ongoing work to make it usable as a regular phone.

Wrong. They come in two triband models: GSM850/1800/1900 and GSM900/1800/1900 http://shop.koolu.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=5&zenid=1mkafqj1ka0tv8tl78u8k3a0f7

http://www.koolu.com/ has a green computer....and a black...and a silver and a pink. And it uses < 10W. Check it out.

What does get warm is the external power supply - I wonder how many watts that consume ? 5 watts for the machine itself, something for the screen, something for the PSU. What is the total consumption ?