OpenMoko Freerunner vs Apple iPhone 3G

There has been a lot of chatter on the OpenMoko Community mailing list this week about the upcoming iPhone, total costs, etc. As a community we basically drilled everything down in terms of overall cost, but I'm also curious about the overall feature set as well.

To do simple math, the 8GB iPhone 3G, versus the stock OpenMoko Freerunner, have very different up-front price tags. When you factor in that you need a voice/data plan for either phone, I started comparing the differences in the cost of a 2-year locked-in contract with AT&T for the iPhone versus the same service for a 24-month period of non-contract service for the Freerunner.

In the course of my research, it turns out that AT&T offers the same voice plans and data plans to iPhone users as well as other smartphone/pda users, so the minimum voice plan of $39.95 and unlimited data plan of $30, is identical for both phones. Over two years, you'd pay $69.95 per month, plus taxes, fees, and surcharges, maybe totaling as much as $80/month, for a total of $1,920. The only difference at the end of the two years is the cost of the phone.
iPhone: $199, only usable with AT&T
Freerunner: $399, international unlocked GSM phone, usable in the USA on both AT&T and TMobile networks. If you can get in on a group sale with others in your area you could get a Freerunner for $369.

Of course, if you purchase application software through iTunes that users create with the Apple SDK, your cost for the iPhone goes up even more.

Engadget also has an article outlining costs which they claim come from AT&T showing a total cost of about $2520 with a $79/month plan for the iPhone 1.0 back in 2007.

Winner: on price alone, the iPhone is about $200 cheaper over the two year span, less than $10/month.

When it comes to features, however, the iPhone has some pretty serious advantages over the Freerunner.

Phone/Data Capabilities:
iPhone: 2G/3G
Freerunner: 2G/EDGE only
Winner: iPhone
(it's worth noting that 3G talk time on the iPhone is only 5 hours versus 10 hours in 2G mode, so maybe it's better that the Freerunner is only 2G?)

GPS:
iPhone: AGPS, not true GPS, so only triangulation is possible, which in my experience is only accurate to about half a mile
Freerunner: actual GPS, capable of pinpointing your location to about 9 feet.
Winner: Freerunner

Accelerometers:
Both phones have it

WiFi:
Both phones have it, but only the Freerunner will let you do Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls over WiFi.
Winner: Freerunner

Bluetooth:
Both phones have Bluetooth 2.0

Memory Capacity:
iPhone: 8GB or 16GB FLASH, plus adding an extra memory card (unsure of capacity capabilities)
Freerunner: 256MB Flash natively, can add up to 4GB in an extra micro SDHC memory card, someone is testing an 8GB SDHC card I believe.
Winner: I'd have it give it to the iPhone here, especially since the SD card bus on the Freerunner is on the same bus as the video display making it difficult to stream movies from the SDHC card -- and the 256MB Flash in the phone is partly used up by the OS on the Freerunner, so it'll be nearly impossible to copy a movie from the card to actually play well.

CPU:
I couldn't find any recent articles about the new iPhone's CPU, but the v1.0 iPhone had an ARM processor running over 600Mhz. I imagine the iPhone 3G runs even faster.
Freerunner: 500MHz ARM processor running at 400MHz due to bus speed constraints.
Winner: iPhone

Display:
Both phones are touch screen, only the iPhone is multi-touch capable
iPhone: 480x320, 163dpi
Freerunner: 480x640, 281dpi
Winner: Freerunner for extra screen real estate and *much* higher dpi.

Audio Playback Capabilities:
iPhone: all of the music formats you've grown to love in iTunes, like AAC and MP3
Freerunner: MP3, but also OGG, FLAC, and other formats (depending on the software stack ported to the phone) that the iPhone cannot play.
Winner Freerunner

Operating System:
iPhone: mobile version of Leopard, but application time slicing, as I understand it, is 'shared' like the old Palm OS where running a different task pauses the last application you were running and gives 100% of the CPU to the new task.
Freerunner: runs the OpenMoko OS, based on Linux, which is a true multi-tasking operating system to run multiple concurrent applications all sharing time slices on the CPU.
Winner: Freerunner

All in all, if I were given a free iPhone to review like I was graciously given a Freerunner to help with reviews and beta testing, I'd still choose the Freerunner unless I needed the camera on the iPhone. I've become very dependent on the full GPS capabilities in my Samsung Blackjack 2, and would have a hard time adjusting back to just having AGPS on the iPhone. Having a true multi-tasking phone plus an open-source platform for running Perl and Python code natively on the phone makes it the hands-down winner.

I won an iPod Touch (8GB model) at SCALE 6x in February 2008 from Shopzilla, but frankly only really use it for podcast audio while I walk to/from work or for scoring dart games using a web app that a coworker and I put together. If I were to get an iPhone, I'd simply give up the iPod Touch and use the iPhone as my podcast audio device and simply use the SIM card in the Freerunner instead.