Purism Continues To Explore i.MX6/i.MX8 For The Librem 5 Phone

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Continues To Explore i.MX6/i.MX8 For The Librem 5 Phone

Todd Weaver of Purism has provided an update on the planned Librem 5 smartphone hardware components and that with a development board they do have Debian booting...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-iMX8-iMX6

[marty1885]

Hopefully they can get i.MX8 to work. A Cortex A9 way out of date when the phone came out.
And I won't support it if it doesn't upgrade to the new CPU.

[leech]

I really want something like this. What other projects are even close? The Neo900 seems to be floating out there, and there is PostmarkOs (I think that is right). But a fully Debian based phone... dream come true.

[bug77]

Hopefully they can get i.MX8 to work. A Cortex A9 way out of date when the phone came out.
And I won't support it if it doesn't upgrade to the new CPU.

Eh, even the iMX8M they hope to use sports less than half the HP of a SD625. And SD625 is on its way out.
But who knows? With proper drivers and no bloat, it may just cut it.

[Guy1524]

I don't trust these people to figure out how to make a competent phone, such a waste of money for the people who donated to their crowdfund

[andyprough]

Shut up and take my $599 dollars.

Jeez, these guys are going to put out something worse than a $40 Mozilla phone, I can already feel it.

[DMJC]

As long as it completely blocks web advertising and can run C/C++ optimised code. It will feel faster than any of the garbage from Apple and Google. Seriously, mobile data is expensive as hell,ads can get fucked. They should be paying US for the privilege of having an ad appear on a mobile device screen. If it runs like a Samsung Galaxy S5 without all the bloat, it will scream compared to what I run now.

[shmerl]

Are there open drivers for this SoC? I.e. besides the GPU, what about the LTE modem and so on? Or it will again rely on the nasty Android blob and will need to use libhybris?

[Guest]

I don't trust these people to figure out how to make a competent phone, such a waste of money for the people who donated to their crowdfund

Well, at least they are trying to it. All other brands offer similar phones for same performance-build-quality/price category.

Puri.sm at least tries to make something unique, and focuses on users. Most of the top companies make money on every user by selling information about people (their customers) and data they collect about their users. It's similar to Google analytics, but in HW/SW/PriorietaryDrivers/M$OS/...

[kingu]

The novena laptop runs GNU/Linux on a quad i.MX6, no problems there. Debian.
The Openpandora and GTA04 runs GNU/Linux on OMAP3, not sluggish. Came out in 2008, OS updated this month.
The Jolla 1 runs GNU/Linux on a 5+ year old Qualcomm chip, problem? No, use it every day.
The Dragonbox Pyra will soon be out with OMAP5, for a handheld it solves all the problem you could want to have solved.

With limited resources, you go wrong with optimization, not anywhere else.
Unless the OS is sluggish, the experience is not going to be.