Purism Shares Latest Librem 5 Phone Hardware Plans, Software Progress

[speculatrix]

I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, N7105 to be exact, and it had been out for about 8 months. At the time people would comment that it was HUGE, with its 5.5" screen (720 x 1280), especially people with iPhone 3 or 4 with their tiny 3.5" screens (640 x 960 resolution)!

I never looked at the phone and thought, wow, the display is really blocky. I'm short sighted so I can hold things really close and even when held uncomfortably close, I could barely see pixels.

So specification warriors, 720x1280 is just fine for a display of 5.7". How many of you hold your phones closer than 4 inches from your eyes? Well, excepting browsing pr0n ;-)

[azdaha]

Then they should invest for a much effective cooling solution - chasis design.

Problem with projects like this is , they really don't know what users value most or less.

Heating on phones is a reality , even on high end phones like Iphone or Samsung's flagships.

Also high resolutions and crazy high ppi's are a reality. People look at that damn screens every seconds , for texting , reading , playing games , consuming media via Youtube etc.

That is just a flop , nothing more. Don't invest money if you really care about your money.

Sure , being open source and secure are good but when you lack most basic things ; these are not important for customers.

First ; make a good phone.

Second ; make a decent software and improve it.

When security and privacy are afterthoughts, lagging so far behind some feature that the eyes can rarely distinguish....

This project has a good idea of their niche, and the gap that they're trying to fill with respect to the mobile device market.
There are plenty of setbacks here and even disappointments; IMHO, that's to be expected with such a project. In the end, I'll be glad to choose a device that aims to be secure and OpenSource from the ground up; even if that means I'll be reading text messages, playing games, and viewing videos on a display similar to that used on the Nexus 5 (2013) or Google Pixel (2016).
To each their own.

[starshipeleven]

What are you talking about?

I'm talking about the fact that Blackberry is using a smartphone SoC with modem and wifi built-in, which has a lower power consumption as stuff is integrated and was designed for mobile market in the first place, while Purism are using a industrial/automotive SoC with external modules like modem and wifi bolted on (both because they can't get a mobile SoC that is open enough and because they want to be able to kill off manually modem and wifi with hardware switches).

So making comparisons between that and the KEY2 is an apple and orange comparison, the hardware is not even similar.

With the built-in DTEK app I can shut down the modem. Maybe not 100% like on Purism's phone because it's software blocking only, but it's more than "everyone else" as "everyone else" does not provide the option of software blocking the modem.

I'd like to know more about this, afaik the DTEK app was mostly a frontend for the Android advanced permissions, like Cyanogenmod/LineageOS's Privacy Guard feature.

[[email protected]]

I forgot to write that a lower resolution was easier to drive with software rendering if they want a fallback. And reading the article, it's clear that those specs are for the development board itself, but unclear if the final product will have exactly the same ones.

Plus, you'll have a better time playing games at a lower resolution, if that's your thing.

[Vistaus]

The resolution of the KEY2 isn't actually all that high, compared to other high-end devices.
It's only 440 ppi, compared to 550-600 ppi in similarly priced phones, and since the device has such a small screen due to the keyboard below it, the absolute pixels to drive are only about 40%-50% of the competitors.

So very simplified, the GPU has to do only half the work to drive it.
Despite the small screen, the device is quite huge, which allows them to fit a very large battery, 3500 mAh compared to for example the latest Samsung with just 3000 mAh.

So there are a lot of factors that cause it to have a long battery runtime: the large battery, combined with a by today's standards medium resolution, combined with a comparatively tiny 4,5" IPS screen that needs a much smaller backlight than competitors.

I think you misunderstood my post and this topic. We were talking about the Purism phone and I was making the comparison with the KEY2. And compared to the Librem 5, the KEY2 has a high resolution. That's a fact and that's what I was talking about.

The screen isn't all that small though IRL, I can tell you. It's actually bigger than on paper/photos. Also, PKB means that there's no VKB taking up half the screen while typing, which also makes it feel bigger.

[Vistaus]

BlackBerry just like everyone else does not have these limitations.

What are you talking about? With the built-in DTEK app I can shut down the modem. Maybe not 100% like on Purism's phone because it's software blocking only, but it's more than "everyone else" as "everyone else" does not provide the option of software blocking the modem.

[Shiba]

I'll have to think about this, everything over 5" is just enormous. However to me a bigger resolution has no value and I wouldn't pay a penny for I higher one.

[intelfx]

Less than FHD display with almost 6"? No 802.11ac? What a disaster.

[R41N3R]

Okay, so a 5.7" 720p display, I wonder how much it costs, if it costs any more than $300 I will be disappointed.
LTE bands it has are bands 2,4,5,17, so it only lacks bands 12, 13, 25, 26, 30, 41, 66, and 71, or literally the majority of all of the deployed spectrum in the United States.

I can get an unlocked LG Stylo 4, for $300 right now. It has a 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, 8-core 1.8GHz Snapdragon 450 CPU, 32GB of internal storage, and it actually has a selection of LTE bands that is fitting for 2018(or any year beyond 2015 for that matter).

But it doesn't offer the same features. Even if there are plenty of cheaper high-end phones available, they cannot offer the same privacy and open source promises. If this phone succeeds, we will have a real Linux phone. It's like with all the Intel systems around, they are insecure by default. If you don't care, you can ignore the security flaws. But Purism is the only vendor that makes these devices secure again. I can certainly value that. And that's why I hope they will succeed with the Librem5 as well. Some parts may not be the best on the market, but I got bored by the new phones anyway.

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

Your arguments are nonsense. A small batch of phones is always much more expensive than mass production. If you just want a cheap phone with a good price-performance ratio then this phone is not for you. Please move on and stop spreading your brainfarts.