Minor point of interest - OpenMoko is the software company, AFAICT, and FIC are the hardware company.
I don't know if that is an accurate statement.
FIC is definitely the hardware manufacturer, but OpenMoko seems to be responsible for a significant portion, if not all, of the hardware design for the OpenMoko phones. (At least, this is what I glean from mailing lists where OpenMoko employees discuss the development of hardware revisions.) This would put them squarely in the hardware company category.
Furthermore, OpenMoko has said or implied that their primary software responsibilities are to write drivers for low level hardware, and to provide basic utilities for testing the hardware. It seems that they have more or less pushed the responsibility of creating a stable application development platform, AKA distribution, to the ephemeral "community".
The abdication of the development of a singular, stable, comprehensive platform for application development was a strategic blunder of monumental proportions that will ultimately be fatal to the company. In the absence of a single platform, the Free Software community has done what it naturally does: fragments. No serious mobile application developers will target the OpenMoko, because there does not exist one stable, comprehensive API that is guaranteed to exist on all phones. (Note: I am not advocating that no one else should be allowed to provide an alternative distribution, or that the official distribution should be closed-source; I advocate that OpenMoko should have allocated the necessary resources to ensure that there would exist one stable, usable, and comprehensive platform, before the first phones ever shipped to the general public.)
In the absence of a single platform, we have many competing platforms such as Gnome Mobile, home-rolled FSO, various partially incompatible versions of Trolltech Qtopia, and a seriously hacked-up Android derivative. On top of that are many competing GUI libraries, such as GTK, QT, Enlightenment, and others. What does a developer target to target all OpenMoko phones? Already, many distributions include all libraries; this is wasteful on a device with only 256MB of built-in storage. What does a developer do to make sure his app fits in thematically with the rest of the phone? There is nothing that can be done, with so many different competing GUI libraries with incompatible widget sets and theming mechanisms. OpenMoko apps look and feel like a Chimera, the mythical Greek monster made of an assortment of animals.
OpenMoko still lacks basic features such as a usable on-screen keyboard (none of the alternatives are particularly good), a usable web browser (once again, many options, none particularly good) and a usable email client. In general, we lack most apps in finger-friendly format. Note to OpenMoko developers: I DO NOT WANT to carry around a stylus with my phone. Furthermore, there is no proper centralized repository (opkg.org is close, but not a real repository), unless you use a Debian distribution, in which case you've got a whole raft of usability problems. In many cases, you have to download important applications from some random hacker's website in Russia (GPRS). And there is no digital signatures mechanism currently being used by anyone that I am aware of, so I have no idea if any of the software I download has been trojaned.
The purported advantage of the OpenMoko design over Android was the native support for X11; I was at first convinced that this was awesome, because "existing GNU/Linux apps could be ported in no time". However, I have seen what most "ports" consist of: dumping the app onto the phone with little or no GUI changes. The OpenMoko screen is 480x640, and the overwhelming majority of X11 apps are no longer are designed to work at this scale. Often, with dumped apps, I find that critical GUI elements are off-screen, with no known way to get to them. Even when the GUI fits onto the screen, often the widgets are so small that they can only be manipulated with a stylus. To be honest, a proper finger-friendly porting of most apps would require so much design and coding re-work, that having an existing desktop GUI in X11 is no advantage from writing the GUI from scratch.
There is still no official encouragement of cellular Internet (currently, GPRS), which is the primary selling point of a smartphone. There is no easy GUI method for setting up Bluetooth devices, which is another selling point of most phones nowadays. Furthermore, there are still obnoxious hardware/firmware bugs. For example, my Freerunner does not warn me with audio when it is running low on battery (a UI bug, most phones have a little tone they make every few minutes when the battery is low), and when the battery runs out, I cannot recharge it without jumping through kludgy hoops; this is a known bug in hardware or firmware, but it has not been fixed for no apparent reason, despite rendering the phone unusable to non-hackers.
In general, OpenMoko still feels like it is a project controlled by hackers who like the idea of a phone, but only use the phone when it is sitting on their desk, attached to a computer via USB. I cannot believe that management could be this clueless about what it takes to build a product, so I will assume that the project is running so low on funding that they simply do not have access to sufficient resources, and are desperately trying to keep it going, hoping for another round of funding.
Wow, that was long, and a bit more ranty than I wanted when I began writing it. I started out extremely enthused about the OpenMoko project, and even when the Freerunner arrived in my mail and was barely functional, I made excuses rather than being upset. The software has improved somewhat over the last 6 months, to the point where it is a usable basic phone for a hacker. However, now that Android is (almost) as Free as the OpenMoko, and the Android phone is available unlocked, and both the Android phone and the Android software are both so much better than the Freerunner and the various OpenMoko distributions, I can only wait until I have saved up enough money to buy an Android phone. I might even try Android on the Freerunner, especially if it becomes less of a hack to install. I simply see no reason for OpenMoko to continue to exist, either as a software or hardware platform. They had a great idea, much earlier than others, but they simply bungled it.