WIRED:I often argue (in places where I hope nobody can hear me muttering to myself) about the difference between "interesting" and "successful" in the technology sector, writes Danny O'Brien.

I'm a sucker for "interesting", often drawn to write about products that, I suspect, will die spectacularly in the market because I think the meteor-trail of their flame-out highlights something new and potentially revolutionary.

Steve Ballmer (below), chief executive of Microsoft, you will not be surprised to hear, has a preference for "successful" over "interesting" any day. He claimed recently that the Apple iPhone was barely worth dismissing, because it is never "going to get any significant market share". Boring.

The truth though is that, damn market share, far more people are interested in the niche-market iPhone than in Microsoft's range of smartphones. It may not make as much money as Microsoft (just as Apple is a fraction of the size of, say, Nokia), but it's somehow far more fascinating.

Is Ballmer really blind to Apple's brand success in the MP3 player world eating into Microsoft's share of the telephone software world? I'm not sure, but I think I can trump him.

When the iPhone launches this year, I'll be paying it even less attention than Steve. I'll be watching the microscropic victories of a clumsy iPhone lookalike, the Neo1973, produced by Korea's FIC, and retailing for about $350 (€258).

The Neo will have a hard time competing with any of the giants of the smartphone market: it's not from Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung or LG. FIC is better known for bargain-basement PC motherboards. That's not to say that the Neo1973 is a fossil. It matches the iPhone for a bright, colourful multi-touchscreen, has GPS and, potentially, Wi-Fi, built in. It has 128MB of RAM, 64MB of flash and upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.

However it will have little marketing and no support from the telephone companies. That's because the Neo1973 is that blasphemy in the mobile phone world - a completely open, non-proprietary phone.

There's no lock-in or "Virgin-only" features. Every part is publicly documented, eminently redesignable and re-hackable by owners and third-party developers alike.

The phone comes running OpenMoko, a Linux-based platform that you could dump for WindowsCE if you wanted, or download your own choice of phone programs.

And the programs you can install can do almost anything they want with the hardware. Right now, the first prototypes of the Neo1973 (the name comes from the Year Zero of the first mobile telephone) are in the hands of open source hackers across the world. The software they write will be downloadable by any Neo1973 owner.

It's the ultimate in unlocked devices. To stop you running VoIP on these phones, mobile phone companies would have to physically ban them from their networks. You'll never need to pay for ringtones, because the features to download new ringtones from any source will be easily configurable. And new applications, which the mobile phone companies will never have considered (because they will never have considered them capable of making money) will be written for the Neo.

An example: one developer wants to port gTune, a free guitar-tuning program, to the phone.

A phone has all the right bits for the job, after all - a speaker to play a tone, a microphone to listen out for the guitar, a screen to tell when all is well. It's just very low down on Microsoft or Nokia's list of killer applications.

Or Apple's, for that matter. In one of the most disappointing post-announcement squibs made by Steve Jobs, a showman who generally knows how to bury in glitz a bad fact or two, the Apple chief executive admitted that the iPhone was a "locked platform".

Only official Apple software will run on it.

Perhaps that's what makes the Neo1973 more interesting than the rest of the mobile phone industry combined. From the point of view of the open source world, they all seem like control freaks. Incredibly successful ones, but is that all there is to an interesting world? If we see an explosion of innovative new uses of mobile telephony from OpenMoko, we'll be able to tell.