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.

This summer the developer boards were delayed to at least August and in the months since have relayed various delays. Last month they said the kits would ship "very shortly following shipping delays while now that is turning into December.

In a new status update, Purism shares their developer kit hardware has most recently been delayed by parts procurement delays associated with Hurricane Florence, a typhoon in China, and the Chinese Golden Week holiday. They now at least have ten boards spun up and are working on validating all of the subsystems and getting the software support into place with its Linux 4.18+ kernel. They have validated many of the hardware subsystems already but still need to take care of the WiFi/Bluetooth antenna, microphone, hardware kill switches, LCD panel, touch controller, USB-C role switching, JTAG, and other subsystems.

Their new hope is to have the developer kits ready to ship around early December. Purism CTO Nicole Faerber shared, "we are doing our very best to ship out all boards in the early part of December, so that all backers should get their new toys well before the end of the year (given the shipping carriers don’t cause delays)."

This latest update along with some developer board shots was posted today to the Purism blog. They haven't shared if the planned release date of the Librem 5 phone will be pushed back, which their latest public comment on that was April 2019, but we'll see if they can have all of the hardware and software ready for that in time.