The first open phone is already out (for developers) called the Neo Freerunner. By “open” I mean that the OS is fully documented, and customizable by those with the skills to modify it. It is using Openmoko which is the competing open mobile operating system (OS) to Google’s Android mobile OS (still no phones with that yet as far as I know). Both projects are leveraging the linux kernel which makes this exciting to me. You can use the new $400 device (which is currently sold out) on the AT&T network, but its mainly going to Universities for use in computer science classes right now.

To be fair, these types of devices are really a lot more than just a “phone”, they are really true mobile computing devices with touch screen input, nice screens (relative to the little Motorola RAZR screens if not the iPhone and enough OS horsepower to actually be useful for real computing. While I don’t expect anything as amazing as the iPhone to secretly emerge, I would be more interested in an open phone than a closed source one on principle as well as potential. (disclaimer: I don’t currently have a cell phone).

Two good websites to watch for news as the 700MHz spectrum opens up next year are:
http://www.openmoko.com/
http://code.google.com/android/documentation.html
We will either see a whole lot of new open phones appearing next year, or a whole lot of nothing since the ‘open spectrum’ was gobbled up by AT&T and Verizon (Google didn’t get any), and neither company probably has any real interest in allowing the other’s customers to operate over their network.