I'm definitely interested in hearing about people's experiences with these. I had pre-ordered one of their development phones last year, but gave up because of the constant delays.
I kept up with the dev list for awhile, but there were a lot of complaints about the hardware - battery life in particular, so I stopped paying attention.
The one thing I'm a bit weary about is their build environment. Last I checked they use OpenEmbedded, which to put it plainly, blew chunks last I tried to use it. After 48 hours of not sleeping I gave up and switched to OpenWRT's new buildroot-ng which I found significantly easier to use.
I hear you, I spent all WEEK fighting with OpenEmbedded. Painfully, it is better than LTIB. Actually there is a sub-set of OE called Poky that is really solid. OE's problem is that the packages vary in quality - primarily in their ability to compile on multiple platforms - Poky picks the betters ones and has fewer platforms, it works very well.
So wait, does the new device run Android? Their site doesn't lead me to believe it does, and google searches only return stories of people failing to run Android on the last one.
Correct, OpenMoko uses the CacaoVM with GNUClasspath for Java - although it is primarily not a Java device. Android is running the DarvickVM which is not actually Java, and runs a Java syntax on top of it. Though the code is compatible, byte code is not, so binary packages for OpenMoko or Android will not run on each other. Thus the two stacks need to be side by side, or you need to rebuild all the packages from one for the other.
I kept up with the dev list for awhile, but there were a lot of complaints about the hardware - battery life in particular, so I stopped paying attention.