Yeah, Om2008 was a disaster. I liked Om2007.2 as a user, but as a developer I can see why it was abandoned. Eventually it was FSO what made the phone actually solid and with proper foundations. If your device shipped with 2007.2 still, it must have been one of the earliest ones, so you've got the whole set of hardware bugs that were fixed in later batches (but so did I).
Still, Freerunner, while usable, required plenty of patience. My current experiences with Librem 5 are so much better - but whenever I play with a PinePhone it does somewhat remind me of my old Freerunner (which still works, BTW!).
Yeah I was part of a group that was involved with a bulk shipment of one of the very first batches, we got all the warts.
Another thing that's worth mentioning was that at first, openmoko were very much over-selling the capabilities and readiness of the device: The Freerunner was initially supposed to be a "consumer-grade" device, with the neo1973 being the prototype / developer version. When I first contacted openmoko I was told that it would be totally usable as a phone out of the box with all the phone functionality you expect. They walked back on those claims and updated their website/wiki pretty quickly after the device actually came out. But not before a bunch of us had handed over our cash.
I'm glad to hear that the stack did get to a somewhat usable state. And I'm even more glad to hear that the librem is better. The experience I had with the Freerunner put me off foss phones for a long time, and the pinephone....didn't help. Maybe I'll take another look at the librem.
(which still works, BTW!)
Yeah my freerunner still mostly powered up the last time I tried, a year or two ago. I think maybe nand had corrupted and I might have had to re-flash it, or something like that. It wasn't in a healthy state but seemed to be mostly OK with a bit of tinkering.
It does deserve some credit as a cool little portable linux device - once I gave up on using it as a phone, I hacked it into a pretty useful GPS and music player device. I was still using it to record GPS tracks for trips in 2016, and I was running it as a second display attached to my workstation for some time after that. It did last quite well, I do have to give it that... But what I bought was supposed to be a phone.
Still, Freerunner, while usable, required plenty of patience. My current experiences with Librem 5 are so much better - but whenever I play with a PinePhone it does somewhat remind me of my old Freerunner (which still works, BTW!).