Aren't most Android phone pretty open in practice? If you're able to rebuild your kernel then what's stopping your from tinkering with the hardware or installing whatever OS you want?
The only closed bits remaining are the firmware blobs for certain IPs but is it really limiting? How many time did you think "man, I wish I could write a custom firmware for my GSM chip!".
Not saying that it's not interesting "for the principle" to have completely open phones but to be brutally honest I'm not ready to use a low resolution resistive display for the sake of it being open source...
This isn't for you; there, I've said it, and I'll add this: the market is large enough to accommodate things like this. Some of us like to tinker, all the way down to the bits in our hardware. Some of us like having a hardware keyboard, like having emacs in the palm of our hand, with all the power that implies. And we don't really care about high resolution capacitive displays.
Maybe it's not your ideal "everyday" phone; good for you for realizing that. I'll leave you to your locked down android (or (shudder) iPhone) on two year contract; I'd kindly request you treat us tinkerers/hackers in kind and leave us to our toys.
I like to tinker as much as anybody else but this phone doesn't get me very excited.
Not long ago there was almost no way to get custom code running on your phone. Now it's getting easier and easier.
Not to mention the various ARM boards you could fit with a GSM module and use to make a custom open phone of your liking and tinker away.
So basically either I want a good everyday phone and I won't go with that or I want to play with phone hardware and there are already a lot of ways I could do that without waiting for this project to deliver.
The only closed bits remaining are the firmware blobs for certain IPs but is it really limiting? How many time did you think "man, I wish I could write a custom firmware for my GSM chip!".
Not saying that it's not interesting "for the principle" to have completely open phones but to be brutally honest I'm not ready to use a low resolution resistive display for the sake of it being open source...