Purism Shows Off First Shots Of The Librem 5 Smartphone's PCB

[audir8]

Somebody start porting android to RISC-V, make a GPU and DSP using RISC-V vector instructions, buy a modem front-end or two, and build GPU+LTE+WIFI+BT stacks. Voila, practical libre android phone. /s

The cost of being open and protecting your privacy and security, is around getting half as much and paying twice as much. It's like buying a house in California, but you don't feel as dirty when you do it.

[starshipeleven]

Does that mean they can just ship one unit to themselves and hold off on the rest indefinitely and still keep their promise?

Easy there, Satan.

[tildearrow]

Does that mean they can just ship one unit to themselves and hold off on the rest indefinitely and still keep their promise?

I really hope they aren't THAT evil...

[Slithery]

The $699 pre-orders for the Librem 5 are still reporting "shipping starts in Q3 2019" as of today.

Does that mean they can just ship one unit to themselves and hold off on the rest indefinitely and still keep their promise?

[L_A_G]

And hey, it could be worse. It's not like it's Duke Nukem Forever

Again, that was a sh*tshow so bad and for reasons so completely removed from this that it really doesn't compare.

Considering the scope of the project and the delays caused by things that are/were out of their hands the delays so far are still within reason. Even if I don't agree the delays that could have been mitigated or avoided using a more pragmatic approach. Starting software development on reference kits for the SoC, moving to a mainline kernel once vital drivers were mainlined instead twiddling their thumbs until they were and not wasting time and money on unique dev and final device boards.

[Vistaus]

As someone who has been one of the most vocal, if not the most vocal, critic of their delivery timetables here on Phoronix even I have to balk at the comparisons to Star Citizen. That game is basically a worst case scenario of what feature creep and a lack of proper delivery timetables can lead to. This thing, while very clearly late in both the software and hardware departments, is still on track for delivery with only a comparatively minor delay.

And hey, it could be worse. It's not like it's Duke Nukem Forever

[L_A_G]

If the phone is going to be that thick (15 mm) with the specs offered, then it is destined to fail as a cell phone. The amount of delays and teasing reminds me of Star Citizen, though it is of course not nearly as bad as that obvious cash grab. Fairphone 3 stands a much better chance.

As someone who has been one of the most vocal, if not the most vocal, critic of their delivery timetables here on Phoronix even I have to balk at the comparisons to Star Citizen. That game is basically a worst case scenario of what feature creep and a lack of proper delivery timetables can lead to. This thing, while very clearly late in both the software and hardware departments, is still on track for delivery with only a comparatively minor delay.

Hell, it's not even completely their own fault, either on the hardware or software side. On the software side you have the delays in getting the drivers for the SoC mainlined and on the hardware side they discovered a serious silicon bug and had to wait for the manufacturer to do a respin of the chip.

[starshipeleven]

Well, that's a good question, but the operative phrase occurred at the very beginning of my post/comment--"I think--"

This does not answer the question. How "you think" dumping all progress so far and starting again would be better.

Everyone can cite some famous quote, not many can actually cite it at the appropriate time.

[starshipeleven]

I think that, if Purism can afford it, their credibility would be best served by doing exactly what Fred Brooks did when he took over the already one-year-behind-schedule OS360 program at IBM: cancelled everything--meaning mainly empty promises--and started over

Yeah, that's a genius move, let's dump all the work they did and start again. That's totally going to improve schedule.

I'm buying a Pinephone when it arrives in the first quarter of 2020 not for any ideological reasons, but because of the capabilities it might have

That's a OEM white box design. They literally just ordered a few crates of a chinese OEM smartphone and *promised* a open firmware for it.

You just chose a different promise to believe, and a lower price tag.

[starshipeleven]

By the way, that PCB is unusually big for a phone in my opinion (yeah, I know it's because it's an early version but still wanted to point out).

The PCB is big because they are not using a highly integrated mobile SoC that has everything in one chip, sharing the same RAM and flash.

That's not an early version, that's a product sample. The phone is going to be THICC.