OpenMoko Neo Freerunner Linux Smartphone Hands-on

The Gadget: OpenMoko’s just-announced Neo Freerunner, which is the mass-market version of their previous Neo 1973 phone.

The Impressions: It uses the exact same UI as the previous version, but is actually really preliminary and buggy in the version we played with (it was power cycling for a short while). They assured us that the phone is really early in the development cycle. The UI looks nice and has glossy icons and not too much text (read: not too Linuxy for people who are afraid of Linux), but it’s nothing you’ve never seen before if you’ve seen the OpenMoko phones before.

The hardware is solid and feels about as wide as the iPhone, but a bit thicker (with rounded corners). It’s too early to tell how well this will do in the mass market, especially compared to the Google Android platform, but Freerunner does show promise.