Librem 5 August Update - More Software Progress, No Word On Q3 Shipping

Purism has published their latest monthly update on the status of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone. They continue bringing up the software stack and tweaking the kernel support, but no word on their finalized hardware design nor if they still plan to ship in Q3'2019 as they continue advertising.

During the past month Librem 5 has seen progress on its libhandy user-interface elements, the Calls application now supports a call history, support for receiving phone calls when the shell/UI is locked, crash fixes to the messaging application, improvements to their Epiphany-based browser, user-interface improvements to the Clocks program, and settings work. They have also made fixes to their on-screen keyboard, fixing up their Wayland compositor and shell, and other low-level improvements. They are making progress but for any Purism phone shipping this calendar year it's still looking like the user experience will be beta quality at best.

They have also been working to improve their kernel support to reduce power consumption and avoid overheating. "The team is trying very hard to better manage the power consumption of the phone and reduce the overall temperature: to make sure we don’t lose basic kernel support, we now check for cpuidle sysfs nodes and DRM render node. We are also working on mainlining thermal-idle to cool the CPU by idle-injection; to ease kernel updates, we improved kernel tests–and the CPUs now slow down when hot, instead of overheating and shutting down."

The Purism web-site continues to advertise the Librem 5 smartphone as coming in "Q3" but with just one month to go, it's looking unlikely they will hit that goal after already having delayed the device previously compared to its original January target. In today's blog post they just mention "delivered soon" though we still haven't seen the finalized phone device while a few weeks ago they finalized the phone specifications for this $699 USD device.

The August update can be read in full via the Purism blog.