The Current Hardware Specifications For Purism's Librem 5 Phone

[blackiwid]

Oh I see privacy only is for people with enough money.
I hope at that price they also checked the modem firmware doesn't contain any backdoor.

And what about what will be on their store? Do they ask devs to provide source? Who will look at the source? Who will guarantee privacy?

Nobody said it's easy to have a privacy respecting phone, if that would be that easy we here all in that forum would have one. I also can't pay for it, and Librem would sure be fine if they could give out such phones for 200 dollar and get enough money from it. But they can't but if I would run a business and security would be of concern you can buy it except you live in very poor country.

Still I don't bitch about it, because they create a software stack and this software stack will not be limited to that phone, and maybe they release later a smaller priced phone with the same stack.

That's btw how it's working in other sectors first features are only available for the most expensive cars like abs or electrical car windows then they become standard at some point for the small cars too.

I would not even think that the price is that horrible if they would have added a keyboard but that's my opinion, hard to do because some would than require to have language specific keyboards, so that's easier to do with software.

But yes if you buy this phone you probably use the off switch on the modem at least most of the time if not completely and use wlan everywhere, because you can have the firmware of your modem as much as you want as soon as it's on you can get triangeld from it. Also I think another big advantage of that modem is that it has no direct access to the system ram, I might be wrong but think I read it.

I don't get why you are so angry that it's to expensive for you, you don't have the right to be able to buy everything you want, I also would like some expensive cars, I don't get angry at the producer because it's to expensive for me.

If you want something cheaper here you go:

https://necunos.com/community/

It could be hard to get the librem firmware ported to that device tho because 1gb ram but we will see...

[ldesnogu]

blackiwid This makes a lot of sense. Sorry if I sounded harsh and negative.

I'm afraid I'm part of the crowd that doesn't care that much about freedom and privacy at all price (I even like Nvidia :P) so I have no interest in this. But if some company comes up with a phone with excellent hardware features and something like PureOS, I'd likely buy it. My first smartphone was a Nokia N900; pricey, Linux based but excellent SoC for the time.

[starshipeleven]

Oh I see privacy only is for people with enough money.

You want them to make free hardware? In the sense of "gratis" of course.

Reading their blog they consider the modem as a black box so I guess they don't know what's inside. So much for privacy and security.

Reading their blog you would also see that it is on USB 2.0 so it is isolated from the rest of the phone.

On normal smartphones the modem is using the very same RAM and has DMA and usually higher-than-CPU privileges.

And what about what will be on their store? Do they ask devs to provide source? Who will look at the source? Who will guarantee privacy?

Flatpak's sandboxing will. Are you selectively reading only the thing you want to read?

[victhor]

I know this is not about shiny specs, but some of these raise an eyebrow in 2019.
My now five, probably by the release date it will be six, years old Nexus 5 was already full HD.

Let's see how the cpu and just 3gb or ram behaves, it may not be that bad. It's not that anyone plans to play Doom 6 on this, right?

To me the biggest question is how long is the battery life, and charging speed. And it won't be answered until we have it.

And it has a jack, that's all that matters today, though...

[Cerberus]

Currently their phone and it's OS are vaporware at it's best, with their current rate of development they will deliver the (heavily outdated) phone in 2021 and finished software stack by 2031. Their progress has been extremely slow and unconvincing so far.

[ldesnogu]

You want them to make free hardware? In the sense of "gratis" of course.

Reading their blog you would also see that it is on USB 2.0 so it is isolated from the rest of the phone.

On normal smartphones the modem is using the very same RAM and has DMA and usually higher-than-CPU privileges.

Flatpak's sandboxing will. Are you selectively reading only the thing you want to read?

I already apologized and explained my bias.

But your comment about price it utterly ridiculous. This HW is obviously underpowered for its price, that doesn't mean it should cost zero.

And your comment about USB also is ridiculous: whatever goes through the modem could go to anybody. That's a privacy concern. You will have to use encryption for all voice/data going through the modem, which makes the phone part of this HW limited.

[cybertraveler]

Did you know the latest $529 iPad 2018 128GB cellular+wifi has 2 GB of RAM?

They say the reason it's sufficient is because iPad runs native high performance ObjC / C++ / Swift apps whereas Androids run interpreted garbage collected (twice the memory reqs) JS and Java apps.

That's probably part of it. Apple seem to care more about software efficiency. One thing they did relatively recently in iOS 11, was they dropped support for 32 bit apps. This means that they no longer have to keep on disk and load into memory 32 bit versions of OS libraries. I'm pretty sure they did this to save on memory consumption and thus improve performance.

Citation: https://developer.apple.com/library/...71/_index.html

[Mateus Felipe]

You are paying for privacy, not (hardware) specs.

Of course, I'm going to pay $600 so they don't know my location so they can't hunt me and kill me.

[tildearrow]

I use firefox and I NEVER run out of memory. How about that, silly Chrome user?


And yes, I'm just kidding (about chrome and memory usage).

I wanted to explain some reasons why I don't use Firefox, but the forum ate my edits...

[starshipeleven]

But your comment about price it utterly ridiculous. This HW is obviously underpowered for its price, that doesn't mean it should cost zero.

Your statement about "privacy can only be given to those paying for it" required that.

For the record, the high price is because they aren't making large numbers of them, mostly because they don't have millions on hand.

And your comment about USB also is ridiculous: whatever goes through the modem could go to anybody. That's a privacy concern. You will have to use encryption for all voice/data going through the modem, which makes the phone part of this HW limited.

You are using the modem to access the fucking internet (i.e. a large amount of third party networking infrastructure) over wireless signals. Any sensitive communication sent to the fucking internet and/or through wireless signals should be encrypted already. Having an opensource modem does not change this basic need so it's more or less irrelevant.