Purism's Librem 5 July Update Cites Software Progress, No Hardware Update

Purism has shared their July update on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone progress, which is mostly focused around inching along their software support but without any update on their hardware or final design. While their latest public information has continued to report a "Q3" ship date, that's looking increasingly unlikely.

Their July update on the Librem 5 smartphone software stack includes improving their libhandy layer, changes to their Calls application, various features are working for their messaging applications, Epiphany-based browser updates, getting GNOME Initial Setup to work on the device, porting of GNOME Contacts to the device is underway, and porting of GNOME Clocks to the Librem 5 as well.

Lower down the stack they have shifted to a Linux 5.2 based kernel, they have a new virtual keyboard, and they continue working on their Wayland-based shell/compositor.

On the software front, they are certainly making progress though a lot of applications still are in-progress for being ported to work nicely on the Librem 5 smartphone and its form factor. Sadly without any mention of the hardware state, it remains to be seen where they're at there, but even with just evaluating the state of their software offering it looks unlikely they could have it all buttoned up nicely for Q3. In fact, it would be hard to imagine the Librem 5 at best to be in a alpha/beta quality state by year's end. I'd like to be surprised, but even now well past their original ship date for the start of 2019, they still have a long road ahead.

Their July software update can be read on the Purism blog.