I'm shipping out to Las Vegas Sunday to cover the paean to all things electronic and retail that is CES 2008.  I literally can't keep up with the PR emails inviting me to tour booths, attend press conferences, and meet with the minds behind "what's sure to be the big hit of this year's show."  One blurb caught my eye, however, and I'm banking on getting my hands on the product in question next Monday at a press-only lunch in Vegas.

OpenMoko will be previewing their newest Linux-based open source handset, the Neo FreeRunner, at CES.  The "mass market" successor to the developer-oriented Neo1973, the FreeRunner is said to feature WiFi, a faster processor with 3D graphics acceleration, and some sort of accelerometers along with a North-American friendly GSM triband radio.

While it's hard to imagine OpenMoko making genuinely big waves in the open source handset market with the Google-backed Anrdoid platform set to sail in '08, I'm all for the open phone movement and psyched to see a Neo in the flesh.  FreeRunner is slated to ship to developers this Spring, and to end users as soon as those devs have cooked up some useful software for the thing.