OpenMoko/Neo1973 is starting to look quite cool, especially in the face of the iPhone’s catastrophic lockdown. It’s somewhat larger than the iPhone - almost into PDA territory - but let’s face it, it is a PDA. And that’s fine! I’m willing to put up with a lot of rough edges for the sake of avoiding lock-in.

Top of the list of cool things, apart from it running Free software, is the screen. It’s not multi-touch, but it’s got a resolution of 640×480, which at 2.8″ across diagonally gives it a pixel density of 282 ppi! That’s about thrice the density of a typical desktop LCD monitor! Even the dedicated e-book reader from Sony only stretches to 166dpi, but admittedly at four times the display area.

So forget about the Neo1973 as a telephone. It may be essential just for its text display abilities. What geek doesn’t believe in the primacy of text as a communication medium?