During most of the long easter weekend, 3/4 of the OpenMoko coreteam met in Frankfurt/Main at my place. It was a very productive meeting and we discussed a lot of topics. My wife Sabine coddled us with lots of excellent food and had to spend half of the easter vacation alone... sorry for that and thanks for everything :-)
We talked about administrative things, schedules, hiring people, supporting OpenEmbedded, and the state of the current hard- and software. Unfortunately most of the really hot topics discussed at the meeting could be classified as confidential, however I think I'm allowed to tell you that we worked on the design of two Neo1973 successors and we came up with something really unique and exciting...
Of course, most of you are probably more interested in the present, i.e. how far away the Phase 1 devices are. About two weeks ago I said something like two weeks -- a prediction that was (of course) too shortsighted. My personal take on that is that I plan to work roughly about one more week on adding some needed features and then enforce a two-weeks feature freeze for the phase 1. There will be a pre-phase-1 snapshot image and p0 developers will be requested to help testing and bugfixing to make the phase 1 experience really stable. By the way, I'll make sure that the phase 1 announcement will include enough information about the phase 1.5 hardware refresh so that you can make up your mind whether you want to wait or just go ahead and buy a freed phone.
Some of the discussions focused on our mid- to long-term plans with OpenMoko -- both as a hardware and a software platform. UI-wise, the applications you see on the Neo1973 are really just the first iteration of our vision. We are somewhat satisfied with the status of the stylus applications, however it already has shown that we can only realize a part of our UI dreams with a toolkit like GTK+, so for some of the applications (finger, main menu, and panels come to mind) we are closely watching how projects like Clutter and EFL evolve.