debernardis, it may be a while before fully libre and open mobile phone hardware is released and OSS drivers are written. But it will happen despite kneecapping efforts by established proprietary market forces. Atheros showed how it's done with their integrated radio chipsets.

Wrt. Debian, it is an absolutely majestic ecosystem but the packages really aren't suitable for mainstream use as they are. (though for us it's still great to have the ocean of apps there if and when we might need them)

A libre phone therefore needs not only open hardware/chipsets with drivers and an open core OS (optimized for mobile use) but also a purpose-built UI and a garden of apps that comply with the UI guidelines.

A lot of effort has gone into making Qt the toolkit of choice for building both the UI and apps that easily fit various devices and user-cases. However Qt is not Debian's choice of preferred toolkits so native apps would - initially - need to be built or ported (and maintained) to "phone-Debian's" garden/repo by an interested group of developers and maintainers.

Now that Nokia has been co-opted to a third party proprietary platform there's no obvious leader pushing an open mobile (communications) OS forward and it will be interesting times ahead.