In my previous blog about OpenMoko and the Neo FreeRunner, I didn’t get around to describing the Neo FreeRunner smartphone.

Firstly, although it looks like an uninteresting slab of a phone, it is actually relatively small, about the length and width of the first generation iPhone, but a bit thicker. Instead of being rectangular, it is oblong, and has a 2.8 inch screen with a VGA resolution (480 by 640). The screen is naturally a touchscreen, and the phone only has two other buttons, bottom right and top left.  As well as 256 MB of flash memory, the FreeRunner can take microSDHC cards up to 8GB. It is a tri-mode cellphone, having either a USA-specific (850/1800/1900MHz) or Europe-specific (900/1800/1900Mhz) bands. For data it has GPRS and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0. There is a built in graphics accelerator and two 3D accelerometers. So much for the hardware.

When I placed the order for the phone, I had a choice of two software distributions: OpenMoko or Qtopia. I had read that Qtopia was the most stable with regards to use as a phone. I wanted to try other software revisions out to check out other aspects of the phone.

To explain – the Qtopia dialer software worked, but not the contacts – that was unstable and crashed. In comparison to the T-Mobile G1, this phone is still “Under Development”. Unfortunately, there isn’t a Neo FreeRunner for Dummies book, as I mentioned previously the documentation is all online. It is also helpful to realize that the T-Mobile G1 is a completed phone, the development paid for by Google, whereas OpenMoko is a small company with limited resources.