Purism Shows Off Latest GNOME Mobile Shell Mockups For The Librem 5

[stiiixy]

I don't hate the style. its not super special. But it is pretty clean.
Basically this mockup is just an artist impression to see how people would respond and i wouldn't be too bothered by it.
This finishing product is probably going to look quite different.

What might be more interesting is to take a look into the app/buttons they include, as this might give more of an idea for the functionality they have in mind.

I am wondering what that "social" button is going to do.
It looks a bit like grouping all the social activities under one app/button.

I always loved the approach that the Nokia N900 took.
What they did was take "Pidgin" application as the basis for storing phone contacts.
Then it was possible to add all kind of communication types to these contacts. ( IRC, MSN, Skype, etc )
This way you only needed on adresbook that would truly manage all your contact details.
All contact communication indifferent of protocol could be should together.
It was a very refreshing approach on mobile for me.

As Purism cannot possible include apps like facebook, skype because they are security bombs maybe something like this than that in itself might be a unique selling point that would make me interested in buying one.

Pidgin nowadays supports skype, wechat, twitter, whatsapp, facebook chat and many other plugins people care about.
Posting on social media might not be the most "safe" thing in the first place.
But if you accept that what you post is public information than such an approach would at least make a complete open source solution and make it more likely that there are no backdoors in the code on your phone while still enabling you to do what most other people do in their lives.

I still have my N900 and use it often and that contact system always comes to mind. Unfortunately, the poor ol beast which was always underspecc'd, excepting the storage (32GB in 09!), for even simple browsing.

Did pidgin manage to get FB chat back? I thought a few companies like FB removed external support so the could push their curated user-bubble crap through the regular interfaces. Might be worth looking at using again, as I hate using full blown FB.