Purism Shares Latest Librem 5 Phone Hardware Plans, Software Progress

[jo-erlend]

On my Samsung Galaxy S8, I use 720x1480 most of the time. Not having the option of going higher on the Purism… I don't know if I care at all, but I do know that I would only care at very few occasions. I don't care much about 802.11AC either.

I'll buy it.

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

If I didn't already have a Fairphone 2 which shall last for at least five years (because of the generated environmental and social footprint) I would consider buying the Librem 5. The possibility to completely deactivate the modem alone is worth a look. I like the concept and wish for a similar approach in the next Fairphone.

[blackiwid]

My honest opinion about this Librem 5 phone project: this is the same as the process of the city of Munich adopting Linux.

Both are/were so badly conceived and done/implemented that it almost seems like they were conceived to fail right from the beginning, so they could be examples of the failing of open source.

Could you stop repeating such urban myths? Let me guess you heard that from a show with Chris Fisher? It was no revolution from the daily users that refused to use that linux distribution and therefor the leadership gave in and gave the users their beloved windows. It was a desicion top-down.

I would say somebody was corrupt, but I can't proof that even I would bet 50.000 Euro on it take it as a loan go deep into red numbers because I am sure about that. But even if not, the new elected mayor had contact with microsoft before he got elected and he admited to be a microsoft fan. (best conditions for a open minded decision).

And at least as gift for dumping limux microsoft moved or build a bigger office place there with many employed. So at best it was a legal bribe in the way that they gave him jobs / more taxes and that makes the numbers look better for munich, so his chances to get reelected better. Most people don't care about corruption or Vetternwirtschaft.

News feed Enterprise Software looks always like absolute garbage for outsiders, they have very very weird (for normal users eyes) priorities maybe especially a german administration. There work the people from Asterix conquers Rome, with the Permit A 38. They don't want good effective software, else the people would good service and it's their instinct to sabotage that at any costs.

So limux the permit 38 OS was perfect for them. Sorry jokes aside, but there is zero evidence that the reason they dumped Limux was because it was somehow bad. The explanation that the financial grants from microsoft towards the city had more to do with it.

And if you make that absurd theory at least mark it with your or chris fishers theory not like it would be a fact.

[blackiwid]

To the phone, there are 2 reasons I would not buy this phone:

1. price
2. no keyboard

Therefor for me that is a long term project anyway, and I only care about the software. If I would be dependent on smartphones much and a company would bye me one for my work, the resolution would be no dealbreaker.

The question is can you use your phone or not, is it 100% not trustworthy like all other phones or can you trust to some degree. Gemini would be something I consider I guess, wifi only, but it's also very expensive so only if a employer pays me one.

[M@yeulC]

Seriously people, what's wrong with this resolution? It's around the same as my laptop, and not a lot less than my desktop. This can save a lot of battery and heat, and I'm all for it; I wouldn't consider buying a > 1k display anyway.

The lack of AC is a bigger disappointment for me, but I could live with that.
Anyway, I would have loved to support them, but not with its stratospheric price point

[M@yeulC]

Seriously people, what's wrong with this resolution? It's around the same as my laptop, and not a lot less than my desktop. This can save a lot of battery and heat, and I'm all for it; I wouldn't consider buying a > 1k display anyway.

The lack of AC is a bigger disappointment for me, but I could live with that.
Anyway, I would have loved to support them, but not with its stratospheric price point

[tg--]

I'll have to disagree on the display resolution: 720x1440 is fine.
Right now I daily use two Samsungs, one S3-LTE and one S7. The former has 720x1280, the latter something absurdly high that I don't even remember it.
If you have them side by side, you notice. If you use them one by one, you notice a little, but don't care, because 720x1280 is just sufficient.

The Librem is slightly below the S3 on the density due to the large display, but honestly, hat's just absolutely fine.
Going to 1440x2560 to be in the range of current high-end phones isn't really feasible. They will rely on the open source vivante drivers, which have performance issues. They will also be reliant on an overall more power hungry setup, due to the less optimized linux stack and their other hardware.

However, where I see the main issue is the CPU. This one also isn't quite up to the other current phones with 4 A53 1,5 GHz cores, but that isn't really a big deal.
However, the i.MX 8M isn't a real mobile CPU.
It's a huge CPU with a large footprint and high power draw, especially considering the relatively low performance cores.
It has a lot of high-performance features like PCIe and RMII, which are nice but pointless for a mobile phone.

Besides being huge, the actual relevant hardware isn't in the SoC, which means, they need separate chips for _everything_.

Right now it appears their upcoming devboard will not actually implement the SoC itself, but a SoM, which means the devboard will be just a carrier board and not fully integrated.
This is fine for evaluating a SoC, but it's not sufficiently close to something they can ship as a phone. They will not even be able to reuse the existing electrical interfaces.

Their LTE modem is interesting, because the supplier is reasonably open and provides well above industry-average public documentation.
It also appears to have voice support (no VoLTE though), which would theoretically enable them to support GSM and (W)CDMA voice calls, which I did not expect.
It's quite dated (a qualcomm chipset from 2012), but it's sufficient.

The same goes for the WiFi chip. It's interesting, supports only pretty old WiFi standards, but its usable and theoretically has 802.15.4/ZigBee support which would be pretty cool.
However, it also only does 2.4 GHz, to support 5 GHz they need a separate chip as RF frontend which I find unlikely to happen due to the complexity in designing the board and actually fitting the parts.
I'm not sure if they went with this chip because its on the i.MX SoM already, or if they will place it on their carrier board and chose it because it's a good choice for them.

Long story short: I remain highly skeptical that they can pull this off, seeing this announcement maybe more than before.
I really want them to succeed, I want just what they plan to do. I struggled if I should back their funding, because I really want it, but I decided not to back because it just seemed unfeasible.

[pracedru]

720x1440 is plenty of pixels..
i had a screen like that on my HTC one. That screen is fine... The phone was a slow piece of crap though.

On my Huawei p20 I can reduce the resolution to 720x1496 and I seriously can't really see the difference.

[Weasel]

720x1440 is plenty of pixels..
i had a screen like that on my HTC one. That screen is fine... The phone was a slow piece of crap though.

On my Huawei p20 I can reduce the resolution to 720x1496 and I seriously can't really see the difference.

Exactly right. Most people don't have 20/20 vision, heck they even need glasses to see properly. I'm personally sick of the resolution obsession from a "loud minority" (probably hipster youngsters) who overdramatize its importance. Get a grip. Lower resolution also means longer battery time since less stuff to compute.

[Vistaus]

720×1440 and 5.7″

What, really? That's worse than Nexus 5 from five years ago, which has 1080x1920 and way more reasonable size (4.95"). 5.7" is huge

I agree that it's huge and I wouldn't want a phone that big, but on the other hand: Samsung phones and the like sell like hotcakes with the same screen size, so...