Purism Still Working On Librem 5 Developer Kits, Delayed To December

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Still Working On Librem 5 Developer Kits, Delayed To December

The Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone was originally slated to launch in January 2019 and its developer kits were supposed to ship this past summer. Now it's looking like the Librem 5 Developer Kits will hopefully arrive in December...

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

[tildearrow]

They haven't shared if the planned release date of the Librem 5 phone will be pushed back,

but it is very likely they will do so.

(P.S.: Their website has the "Older posts" and "Newer posts" buttons reversed, which is kind of annoying since I'm used to seeing the Older button at the right (as a "Next" button)...)

[L_A_G]

I expected them to be pragmatic and push out the developer boards with an NXP proprietary kernel by September and then change to a mainline kernel once support has been merged into mainline, which to my knowledge has so far been limited to few bits and pieces. Turns out that like with the success chances of the crowdfunding campaign, I was wrong and they still haven't shipped out the dev boards.

Also seems like I was mistaken when it comes to the dev board as they're using their own in-house dev board rather than going with standard NXP reference boards and then switching to their own boards for the production device, thus avoiding the hassle of having to build two different boards and everything involved in doing so. Using a reference board from NXP would probably have allowed them to start shipping out devkits by July. Seems that they truly are dedicated to uncompromised open software and hardware in a very un-pragmatic "cost and time be damned" way.

[Azrael5]

which hardware is implemented into this smartphone? thanks

[Vistaus]

but it is very likely they will do so.

(P.S.: Their website has the "Older posts" and "Newer posts" buttons reversed, which is kind of annoying since I'm used to seeing the Older button at the right (as a "Next" button)...)

Really? I'm used to seeing it the way Purism did it.

[Serafean]

Seems that they truly are dedicated to uncompromised open software and hardware in a very un-pragmatic "cost and time be damned" way.

Well, they are a Social Purpose corporation, so financial efficiency comes at best second place (https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/).

And, in the long run this might be the more efficient approach: from the beginning you allocate all your resources to the best approximation of the final product, instead of working on releasing a hacky board you'll never use again, only to redo 40% of the work for the final board. Not to mention uselessly solving issues on the first hacky board, which won't appear on the final.

I am in favour of the approach "take your time, do it well".

[tildearrow]

which hardware is implemented into this smartphone? thanks

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-August-Hardware

SoM: EmCraft’s i.MX 8M System-On-Module
Display: an LCD display that is 5.7″ at 720×1440 pixels
Modem: SIMCom 7100A (USA version/bands) or SIMCom 7100E (EU version/bands) – depends on where you live
WiFi+BT module: Redpine RS9116 M.2 module. It supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands for WiFi, no 802.11AC
Camera sensor: the CMOS image sensor chip is the Omnivision OV5640

[L_A_G]

...

Nothing wrong with trying to do good work per say, it's just that they obviously don't have have an infinite amount of time and are going to be particularly constrained on the money front. From the perspective of an application developer, i.e who the devkits are actually for, an NXP reference board running the same software except with a non-mainline kernel is probably enough to get their applications ready to "just work" on the final device and it would have allowed them to have devkits out the door and in volume months ago.

Let's not even go into what they could do for the actual production device with more resources to spend on making it better...

Maybe I'm too focused on actually being able to deliver something working, but I personally try to built upward towards something great rather than trying to go fully featured from the get-go. The Apollo program didn't shoot for the moon with the first flight, the had multiple unmanned flights, a manned earth orbital flight, a flight around the moon and only then went for an actual moon landing mission.

[Azrael5]

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-August-Hardware

many thanks for your answer, and which cpu and gpu it implements?

[tg--]

many thanks for your answer, and which cpu and gpu it implements?

That's the "SoM" or "System on Module" part, it's a Emcraft i.MX 8M.
Emcraft does the "Module", i. e. a small daughterboard containing the CPU, RAM and other stuff.
The used SoC on the SoM is a NXP i.MX 8M which has 4 ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit Cores, and a 2 Core Vivante GC7000 Lite GPU.

Since they can't really use a SoM in a phone, only the devboard will contain the Emcraft board, the phone itself must use the pure NXP SoC.