openmoko SHR
Last summer I bought a Neo Freerunner, the open phone + GPS + music player. I played with it for a few months but eventually got tired since It didn't actually work as a phone.
Yesterday I gave it another go. I flashed it with the testing version of the SHR (Stable Hybrid Release) and I was very happily surprised.
My experience was a bit different than this guy, but along the same lines: http://openmoko-fr.org/blog/index.php?post/2009/05/09/Test-de-SHR
I found that the basic cell phone stuff works OK out of the box. The quality of the voice calls is very good. Gone is the old echo and low volume problems. I didn't see how to change the volume during the call, but that's a minor issue. Hibernation works well, and it wakes up on incoming calls. The wake up still takes longer than I would like, but it's usable. The battery lasts much longer than before when the phone is not in use.
Wifi was a bit more complicated. I used mofi (I think I had to install that one with opkg). Before using it I have to manually turn on the wifi antenna. Then it properly detects wifi stations, but it doesn't connect until I manually set iwconfig eth0 essid XXXX from the command line. After that it works fine until next reboot.
Today I tried the GPS. Tango gps is installed by default and it works nicely. I had to fiddle with the settings menu to manually turn on the gps antenna and restart the GPS daemon, but no command line magic was required. It worked fine for a while, tracking and saving the route, but when I went indoors and lost the signal the phone hanged :(
It was the first time the phone hanged since I installed SHR. I guess I'll have to be careful when using GSM. Overall a big improvement though. IT seems I will finally be able to use the moko as my primary cell phone. But then, I use the cell phone very occasionally, so YMMV.