15 ms·

Librem 5 Phone Funded

364 points by mike-cardwell 9y ago

lurker12390879 9y ago
To the moon!
madmax108 9y ago
Interesting. Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop? Similar to how Ubuntu phone was in principle. Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store? Really interesting, but so many questions unanswered about what I can do with the phone once I buy it.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  It's super early here, so it's likely they don't know a lot for sure. It's not like they have a working reference phone even yet, they're playing with a system board and getting touch working according to the last post. I pitched in $20 to support them, but buying a phone I might not get that I wouldn't be able to use for at least a year that may or may not meet my needs at that time was a bit of a stretch for me. Willing to bet there are many others in the same boat there.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop?" Yes. Any Linux app that runs on ARM. Most desktop apps don't have a UI that works well on mobile, and some apps are pretty much a no-go just because of performance, but aside from that you're free to install the software you want. > "Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store?" Yes, you'll be able to use package managers. The proposed phone aims to support multiple distros, including Debian and Ubuntu if you want to use apt-get. The flagship OS for the device is Pure OS, which currently uses GNOME Software as its app store (I'm guessing they might extend it with the option to install commercial software before launch): https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software
- chrisper 9y ago
  You could try Termux on Android. It's kind of like that but not quite.
- unlmtd 9y ago
  Anything that runs on arm + wayland basically.
sexydefinesher 9y ago
These are great news. We are lucky to have purism bring FOSS and privacy to the masses in a pretty package.
s73ver_ 9y ago
Good luck to them, but getting the funding is only a third of the battle. Now it remains to see if they can build something that a substantial amount of people will want to use.
- kawera 9y ago
  It will probably be a niche product but, regardless, I'm super happy we have an alternative to the current duopoly.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Well, we don't yet. But I do wish them the best of luck in creating one.
- MrMember 9y ago
  That's what's preventing me from buying in this early. I would love to have a phone that's open and runs actual Linux but $600 is a lot of money for a product that doesn't exist yet and has a tentative ship date more than a year out.
foota 9y ago
Seems like really low funding for what they're aiming for
- platinumrad 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm somewhat worried about this as well as 1.5 million is not a lot considering that they actually have to ship phones in the end and can't just pour it all into R&D. I'm assuming that they'll be using mostly commodity hardware (i.MX 8M SoC plus Alibaba-tier chassis, lcd, capacitive layer, etc.) but even then they still have to put everything together and create a deliverable product with reasonably workable software, although I expect that they plan on leaning heavily on the KDE/GNOME/Debian communities. Probably going to flip a coin later this week to determine whether I'm going to back this or not.
  - JonFish85 9y ago
    $1.5m, and seemingly a team of somewhere between 18 and 27 people, they're going to need more funding. If they're paying $5k/person/mo (assume for now this includes things like taxes and overhead), that's one year's worth of money. On top of this, they have to cover things like FCC certifications, fees for getting manufacturing rolling and all the other fun stuff that comes with shipping physical product.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      $1.5m does seem like a low target for a crowdfunded smartphone, but it's worth bearing in mind that the salaries of those involved will not be propped up solely by a single device. Purism already sell a range of laptops: https://puri.sm/products/ https://puri.sm/products/
      - JepZ 9y ago
        Wow, their laptops look great. Not cheap, but fairly priced. I hope they will still offer updated versions when I have to replace my XPS.
    - 9y ago
legulere 9y ago
How to fund a good user interface and ecosystem when even Microsoft failed at that (see other article also on the top today)
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  They don't have to fund that. The idea is to make use of the work of the open-source community. The main contribution, software-wise will be pushing forward Matrix, pushing forward open drivers, and designing a platform that makes it easier for others to build apps. Plasma Mobile is one example of an existing open-source project that aligns with their goals: https://plasma-mobile.org/ https://plasma-mobile.org/ Ubuntu Touch (now maintained by UBports) is another good option: https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
- mattnewport 9y ago
  Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI. Lack of an app ecosystem was probably Windows Phone's biggest problem. I think a possible solution to that for Purism (I was an early backer of this campaign) is to focus on web apps. I know I'm not alone in being thoroughly sick of everything about apps and app stores.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    If they have even partial support for QT and GTK they can just use existing desktop apps. Clunky, but it helps.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    >Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI You were definitely in the minority. The one common link between Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone was that hideous and universally rejected tile interface abomination. It was so vile and user hostile that Microsoft had to eventually hide it behind a button in Windows 10.
    - 9y ago
paxy 9y ago
Looking through their website I'm curious why what they're aiming for can't be accomplished with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) or a fork of it, rather than trying to build yet another smartphone ecosystem from scratch?
- subway 9y ago
  AOSP still relies on a bunch of hacked together BSPs with nasty binary blobs and never-ever-gonna-get-mainlined device specific kernel patches.
  - scintill76 9y ago
    They could release open-source and mainlined versions of that stuff then. I guess they wouldn't because they probably consider Android incompatible with their other goals.
    - subway 9y ago
      The work they're doing is effectively that. There's nothing stopping Android from running on top of the kernel work they're doing. Think of their work as developing an open source BSP. It looks like much of the UI work is being punted to whatever phone ui the KDE and Gnome projects churn out. An Android userland will likely ship in parallel or shortly after. The bits AOSP handles are by and large boring and don't need to be futzed with.
  - paxy 9y ago
    Random BSPs don't matter considering they're releasing their own hardware, and can support that as much or as little as they want on top of AOSP.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Replicant then: https://www.replicant.us/ https://www.replicant.us/
- bo1024 9y ago
  A huge point of their approach is the hardware.
diminish 9y ago
We really need a phone for hackers no matter how small the market is. I hope that's Librem this time after Neo, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS.
- mortenjorck 9y ago
  It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't. The only possibility I can imagine is that by leaning into a niche market, embracing low-volume but also the community that goes with it, rather than engaging in a quixotic quest to become a viable competitor to the established duopoly, Librem can become sustainable along the lines of niche laptop manufacturer System76. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, and it would be pretty cool.
  - ralmidani 9y ago
    This. Free Software doesn't need to be ubiquitous or even dominant. Most end-users don't want Free Software right now. As long as the Librem 5 becomes feasible, we can worry about market share later.
    - bduerst 9y ago
      Isn't market share part of making the phone feasible? Economies of scale and all that.
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        The costs of developing and commercializing the components in smartphones are borne by the Android, automotive, and other high performance embedded markets. They just need to make it viable enough to assemble the components and put them in an enclosure. So it's perfectly feasible to have a small market device like this if the market price covers the cost of buying chipsets off the shelf, and assembling them.
      - ralmidani 9y ago
Tepix 9y ago
Great news! I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS." The device drivers for one. I'm not aware of any Nexus device with open-source device drivers.
- ramshorns 9y ago
  The operating system too. CopperheadOS uses a noncommercial license, so it's not open source or free software.
JepZ 9y ago
Is there any special reason why they choose Matrix instead of XMPP?
- subway 9y ago
  It feels like over the past few years most of the XMPP crowd has shifted to Matrix. XMPP failed to get BOSH out the door quickly enough to maintain traction.
- aloisdg 9y ago
  matrix about xmpp: What is the difference between Matrix and XMPP? The Matrix team used XMPP (Openfire, ejabberd, spectrum, asmack, XMPPFramework) for IM before starting to experiment with open HTTP APIs as an alternative in around 2012. The main issues with XMPP that drove us in this direction as of 2012 were: - Not particularly web-friendly - you can’t easily speak XMPP from a web browser. N.B. Nowadays you have options like XMPP-FTW and Stanza.io that help loads with letting browsers talk XMPP - Single logical server per MUC is a single point of control and availability. MUCs can be distributed over multiple physical servers, but they still sit behind a single logical JID and domain. FMUC improves this with a similar approach to Matrix, but as of Oct 2015 there are no open source implementations. The MIX XMPP extension also aims to address this limitation. - History synchronisation is very much a second class citizen feature - Bridging to other protocols and defragmenting existing communication apps and networks is very much a second class citizen feature - Stanzas aren’t framed or reliably delivered without extensions. See wiki.xmpp.org for an XMPP take on this - Multiple device support is limited. Carbons and MAM aim to resolve this - Baseline feature set is so minimal that fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common, especially as interoperability profiles for features have fallen behind (as of July 2015) - No strong identity system (i.e. no standard E2E PKI, unless you count X.509 certs, which are questionable) - Not particularly well designed for mobile use cases: push; bandwidth-efficient transports. Since the time of writing a Push XEP has appeared, and wiki.xmpp.org states that XMPP is usable over a 9600bps + 30s latency link. This said, the whole area of XMPP vs Matrix is quite subjective. Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together. The more federation and interoperability the better. We think of Matrix and XMPP as being quite different; at its core Matrix can be thought of as an eventually consistent global JSON db with an HTTP API and pubsub semantics - whilst XMPP can be thought of as a message passing protocol. You can use them both to build chat systems; you can use them both to build pubsub systems; each comes with different tradeoffs. Matrix has a deliberately extensive ‘kitchen sink’ baseline of functionality; XMPP has a deliberately minimal baseline set of functionality. If XMPP does what you need it to do, then we’re genuinely happy for you :) Meanwhile, rather than competing, an XMPP Bridge like Skaverat’s xmpptrix beta or jfred’s matrix-xmpp-bridge or Matrix.org’s own purple-matrix has potential to let both environments coexist and make the most of each other’s benefits. source: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-xmpp https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...
kepano 9y ago
This is an admirable effort, but unless tens of thousands of units are put into production it will be very difficult to get the attention of even the smallest Chinese OEMs. It appears they've pre-sold less than 2000 units. I wonder if it would be more fruitful to work from an existing phone with solid build quality and simplifying the process of jailbreaking it and installing FOSS on it.
- chx 9y ago
  Separating the CPU and the baseband is going to be a challenge when building this device and impossible on any other device. But, if you want a libre phone then you must because the baseband will be a black box that's unavoidable.
- j45 9y ago
  Having the ability to create the first 2 or 3 waves of prototypes is nothing small. iPhone 1-3 needed improvement, similar to the galaxy note. Maybe there's a Oneplus angle here where they can start small and lean with a partner.
- wvh 9y ago
  Jailbreaking and installing FOSS like Jolla is doing with Sailfish on Xperia X right this week, with some help from Sony Open Devices. Still, it would be nice to have some hope do be able to do it without relying on manufacturers' goodwill... If ARM gets sufficiently commoditised so it's cheap (both time and money) enough for smaller players to create hardware, surely there must be enough open-source and/or privacy-oriented folks around to come up with a profitable product?
  - cameronhowe 9y ago
    Jolla/Sailfish is not FOSS, and they have no plans to be so in the future either.
    - jcelerier 9y ago
      It's still the closest option we have to "desktop linux stack running on a phone". Wayland, Qt, BTRFS, systemd, glibc...
chx 9y ago
I trust they did their research but separating the baseband from the CPU will be a major, major PITA.
- closeneough 9y ago
  Can you explain why?
  - chx 9y ago
    Read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722515 Baseband typically uses DMA to interact with the main system.
1001101 9y ago
> Separate mobile baseband Ok, how do we know the hardware/software there pushes the goals of security and privacy? I2S hooked up? (that would scare me on a design with the stated goals, but it makes it really nice for getting good acoustics with your mechanicals) Simply pushing app processor encrypted data over the bearer? > i.MX Love the i.MX 6/8 APs, but I would recommend prototyping/de-risking the power budget up front. 100% open source warms my heart. Would love to see if this could be built.
comboy 9y ago
I imagine they cannot afford to do their own radio chip. And that's already enough to track you. Android does not seem to be the problem. When going with custom OS if this phone gets any traction then I'm pretty sure some helpful OS contributor from three-letter-agency will add something from his heart, because by running it you are already signaling that you are an interesting target.
tom_mellior 9y ago
This crowdfunding campaign started on August 24. It was at $750000 after a month on September 26, needed ten more days to reach a million on October 4, and then somehow raised the remaining $500000 in five more days? This seems weird. They didn't have that much press over this last week. I wonder if they had investors all along and only pretended to crowdfund. (I'm not saying this is a scam or anything. I participated.)
- Arathorn 9y ago
  My interpretation is between some concrete evidence of actually being able to build this (https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8 https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8 and https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/28/experiments-with-matrix-on-the-purism-librem5-starring-ubports-and-nheko/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/28/experiments-with-matrix-o...) and then hitting the $1M mark (https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-campaign-surges-past-one-million-dollars/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-campaign-surges-past-one-mill...), the campaign finally got critical mass. These stories seemed to get pretty major press (e.g. top of HN).
  - rrix2 9y ago
    Anecdata: I only chose to back it after they reached the 1mm mark.
    - tom_mellior 9y ago
      Fair enough. Though now that the campaign has really achieved critical mass, is fully funded, and further people could buy in ostensibly without any risk... it has stagnated at 107% and not moved in at least 24 hours.
- shmerl 9y ago
  They got more publicity from Gnome and KDE backing the project.
- __d 9y ago
  I suspect that at first people held back, fearing that the project would be limited to the i.MX6 CPU, wouldn't get a critical mass, etc. As the funding threshold neared, confidence grew, and more people signed up. It might also just have taken people a week or two to decide to commit a bunch of money to a 15-months away delivery ...
pacala 9y ago
Somewhat related, does anyone know of a solution to run https://signal.org https://signal.org and nothing else? 5 out of 7 days I don't really need a smart phone, I only need the signal app. Working to break my smart phone addiction.
- j45 9y ago
  You could run a tablet data plan sim (data only) in a mobile phone.
- maerF0x0 9y ago
  maybe build one w/ raspberry pi?
- skymt 9y ago
  If you're just looking for something to help with self-control, start by setting up parental controls on your phone. Having to tap in a lengthy passphrase to access apps not on your approved list breaks the instant feedback that feeds phone addiction.
shmerl 9y ago
Congratulations! I'm looking forward to the actual release. It's quite hard and risky however, and if anything, previous failed projects are an indication of how volatile all this is (like hardware partners pulling support in the middle of the development cycle and so on). It would be great to have a device running Linux with native Wayland, and LTE modem separated from the CPU for better security. I just hope they'll go with i.MX 8M so it will be 64-bit. How is etnaviv for it though? I also wonder what's the level of OpenGL support in it. I suppose Vulkan support isn't even started?
- starkruzr 9y ago
  I've always wondered why open phone hardware is universally terrible in terms of capability and performance.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Because no one made good ones open? ARM based SoC manufacturers have historically abysmal record of opening anything up. It's a pity AMD and Intel didn't break into making good mobile CPUs and GPUs.
- petecox 9y ago
  Th most interesting thing for me about i.MX is not 4K video or Vulkan. Quite the opposite. It is the chip powering my Kobo and, I suspect, Kindles. An e-ink phone with a 3 day battery life! But being a hacker phone, as long as performance isn't too shabby when docked to a regular 3D accelerated LED monitor with Wayland desktop would be a nice balance.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Good graphics stack is quite important too. I suppose they can crowdfund missing OpenGL and Vulkan support for etnaviv. I'd support such effort.
rallycarre 9y ago
Doesn't matter. They'll be a gov't backdoor in either the hardware or the software so you might as well get an android phone and load copperhead os on it as it will have the same result.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  The Librem laptops come with hardware killswitches. The aim is to do the same with the Librem 5. Kind of hard for governments to spy on you using a microphone, camera, etc... without electricity.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Kinda hard to use the phone too, without electricity.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      With the proposed design for the Librem 5, you can turn off the individual features of the phone without turning off the phone. So for example, you can turn off the camera (with a hardware switch, which is not something that can be overridden remotely) whilst still being able to browse the web. As far as I know there are no other modern phones with that feature.
maerF0x0 9y ago
Will it have a GPS?
- sipos 9y ago
  The page says yes, it is included in the list of sensors. Whether they can deliver what they promise (I imagine GPS will not be the stumbling block here) is not certain of course, so I can't say "Yes - it will have GPS" with certainty.
greenhouse_gas 9y ago
Why don't they base their OS on Replicant? It's FOSS, Linux-based, has apps and is Mobike-optimized.
- uabstraction 9y ago
  I don't know about you, but I want to get as far away from the whole Android ecosystem as possible. I don't want "Linux-based." I want fully fledged GNU/Linux in my pocket. I want to take advantage of GNOME/KDE's convergence interfaces. I want to develop real Unix software and port it to a phone without rewriting it for cocoa touch or Android's java API. There is so much great software available for GNU/Linux that we have the potential to tap into, and many of them can be made to work on a 5" touchscreen with a little bit of elbow grease. Firefox OS and Ubuntu phones failed because they ignored the giant stack of software sitting right in front of us. Purism would do well to leverage the software we already have and love, rather than wasting time designing new application models and distribution channels which nobody asked for in the first place. There's been a hole in my heart since the day the Nokia n900 was discontinued. I've got my fingers crossed on this one.
c0smic 9y ago
Really hope purism finds success with this. An open phone platform has been a long time coming, I hope they can learning from the missteps of ubuntu and firefox. I like the idea of managing my phone like I manage my computer; install whatever OS and software I want on it. Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated and working, and if this is a primary communication device that effort becomes more urgent. But hey, I think that's just what it takes to not be dependent on a corporation that takes my data/info in exchange for device support.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  > Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated Yeah, but you actually get the option, and you, the owner of the device, have the power to make it happen.
  - gehsty 9y ago
    Crowd funded, then crowd sourced security updates? Really? I think it is a noble effort with zero chance of success, its like Linux on the desktop, but with the further complication of expecting people to pay $$$ for out of date hardware, with what will no doubt be terrible software, with no apps users actually want to use....
    - bostand 9y ago
      Define success. Btw, Linux on desktop is used by many large tech companies...
      - gehsty 9y ago
        Used by a significant portion of computer users, ie Windows Phone is not a successful platform, Android is, and if Microsoft can't make a successful phone platform, what chance does this go fund me campaign have. 'Many large tech companies' is pretty insignificant when you look at the number of people who use desktop computers, and then even more insignificant when you look at the number of people who use phones, and is a very poor metric as it doesn't really consider people actually choosing to purchase the system when others are on offer. There is just no value in their proposition to consumers... Have an expensive old phone, made by a company that can in no way support your purchase should the hardware fail... And I don't believe for a second that it will be more secure than iOS or even Android. Small team, custom operating system, the user can install their own OS, sounds like a recipe for disaster.
mikenew 9y ago
I "bought" mine. I'm not sure what their probability of success is, but if it's around 30% or so I'm fine with that. The world needs a viable alternative to the big 2 mobile OSs, and even if the market share is tiny the difference between having an alternative and not is huge. I've been an iOS developer for years and made a comfortable living, but it bothers me on a deep and fundamental level that my primary communication and computing device is controlled by someone else, and the software I'm allowed to run and allowed to distribute is entirely decided by them. I'm willing to risk money if it helps our chances of having an alternative.
- shmerl 9y ago
  We have free mobile OSes, but what's much harder is hardware where they can run.
cordite 9y ago
I hope it works better than the blackphone. I could barely use it for a year before the basic functionalities like battery life were impractacle.
andrefreitas 9y ago
Seems a good phone for those that use Smartphones and have concerns about privacy issues. In term of applications, is a phone focused in a particular ecosystem: Matrix for encrypted communications and HTML5 Apps. Maybe it will suffer from the same pain as Ubuntu Phone? No native Apps being developed by major Companies? Maybe is a tradeoff that users can live with.
- rrix2 9y ago
  There's also plans to port KDE's mobile stack (including PIM suite) to the librem's operating system, providing at least one fairly comprehensive set of software. Your bank probably won't ever have an app running on it though, you're right. I think most mobile apps that people use elsewise have decent enough PWAs that it won't be such an issue as long as PWAs are well supported at the UI layer.
  - petecox 9y ago
    Anbox.io is in its infancy - run Android apps in an LXC container.
sipos 9y ago
It is annoying that they cannot be more committed to open hardware. (I'm not saying they should be). I appreciate that they probably can't commit to it at this stage, but the fact that their laptops are not does not inspire confidence that the noises they make about trying will come to fruition.
gabryys 9y ago
> A fully standards-based freedom-oriented system, based on Debian and many other upstream projects, has never been done before–we will be the first to seriously attempt this What about OpenMoko?
deleted 9y ago
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bitmapbrother 9y ago
Is the cell radio firmware also going to be open source? And if not why are they making claims of user privacy when they cannot guarantee the capabilities of some binary blob they have no control over?
- rrix2 9y ago
  By decoupling the baseband from the CPU so that it can't directly access the OS's memory+busses and securing communication on the wire (defaulting to secure messaging over Matrix, and using SSL everywhere) so that it can't be sniffed in transit by the modem. I'm guessing that what this ends up looking like is a USB modem talking to the OS with pppd or a similar model that also enables voice calls over LTE
- popopo1 9y ago
  Legally speaking you are not allowed to run one
jordigh 9y ago
I haven't had a phone mostly because I refuse to have any non-free software controlling my life. I don't want to be tracked, manipulated, or have a computer attached to me at all times with a second, hidden computer inside that can do things I don't want it to do nor can even know about. I'm excited about Librem, if it is what I think it will be: a phone I can completely trust. I'm also extremely surprised that it got funded. 1.5e6 USD is not a modest goal given how stingy we usually are about freedom-respecting projects.
zanybear 9y ago
If Microsoft would support this from a distance - thru open source and maybe some financing - this would be their best play in the mobile space. They would achieve way more than Windows Mobile ever did.
- quickben 9y ago
  Ms doesn't enter markets where they have no control (OSS or closed ecosystems).
noncoml 9y ago
Jan 2019 seems a bit aggressive. If they do manage to pull it off thought, even for a later date, I will be definitely placing an order as soon as possible.
kakarot 9y ago
> CPU separate from Baseband How separate?
fghtr 9y ago
Why hasn't neo900 [0] been successful so far in comparison with the Lbrem 5? Are there any drawbacks in the former? [0] https://neo900.org https://neo900.org
- pedroaraujo 9y ago
  To be honest, the communication of the neo900 project is not that good. They only made two updates during the entire year of 2017 and even those don't say much about what exactly they have been doing all this time. I'm not implying that they have been fooling around with the money but it gives me the impression that they are not good at planning things and communicating with people.
nitin_flanker 9y ago
Anybody aware of the exact specifications? For camera, screen resolution, battery? I love the concept but being an average smartphone user I'm sure many people, like me, would like to know more about the basic things that we use everyday (camera for example).
- onion2k 9y ago
  There aren't any specs. This project is to design and build a privacy-oriented phone; it's not at the point where anything is settled on yet (afaik).
earlybike 9y ago
I'd love to have a BlackBerry-style phone with a keyboard and all main features are shell-based and implemented in a POSIX-like manner (with an optional GUI on top). But I think this will never happen.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hathym 9y ago
Would be much much easier if they built the OS for current hardware.. I don't understand why they need to build their own
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  A phone that runs on the mainline kernel is the key part of this project, the software is secondary.
- ptman 9y ago
  please point out sufficiently open hardware
noxecanexx 9y ago
Does anyone know what they mean by support now and pay later
- r3bl 9y ago
  It means you select the amount of money and they deduct it from your account once the crowdfunding is done. Before they've reached their goal, it was an "all-or-nothing" campaign, so the backers wouldn't lose any money if the goal was not reached.
hasteur 9y ago
Great... yet annother Open OS phone/computer. Not like that's been done before to "great acclaim". Anybody remember Jolla, the SailfishOS, and the Jolla Tablet?
s0me0ne 9y ago
I wonder why none of the feature phone OSes have been open sourced? Is it because they only work on the one device they were installed on? Cricket and all the other feature phones before smartphones had tons of Operating Systems, maybe that would give people a head start?

364 points by mike-cardwell 9y ago

To the moon!

Interesting. Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop? Similar to how Ubuntu phone was in principle. Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store? Really interesting, but so many questions unanswered about what I can do with the phone once I buy it.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
It's super early here, so it's likely they don't know a lot for sure. It's not like they have a working reference phone even yet, they're playing with a system board and getting touch working according to the last post. I pitched in $20 to support them, but buying a phone I might not get that I wouldn't be able to use for at least a year that may or may not meet my needs at that time was a bit of a stretch for me. Willing to bet there are many others in the same boat there.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop?" Yes. Any Linux app that runs on ARM. Most desktop apps don't have a UI that works well on mobile, and some apps are pretty much a no-go just because of performance, but aside from that you're free to install the software you want. > "Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store?" Yes, you'll be able to use package managers. The proposed phone aims to support multiple distros, including Debian and Ubuntu if you want to use apt-get. The flagship OS for the device is Pure OS, which currently uses GNOME Software as its app store (I'm guessing they might extend it with the option to install commercial software before launch): https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software
chrisper 9y ago
You could try Termux on Android. It's kind of like that but not quite.
unlmtd 9y ago
Anything that runs on arm + wayland basically.

sexydefinesher 9y ago

These are great news. We are lucky to have purism bring FOSS and privacy to the masses in a pretty package.

s73ver_ 9y ago

Good luck to them, but getting the funding is only a third of the battle. Now it remains to see if they can build something that a substantial amount of people will want to use.

kawera 9y ago
It will probably be a niche product but, regardless, I'm super happy we have an alternative to the current duopoly.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Well, we don't yet. But I do wish them the best of luck in creating one.
MrMember 9y ago
That's what's preventing me from buying in this early. I would love to have a phone that's open and runs actual Linux but $600 is a lot of money for a product that doesn't exist yet and has a tentative ship date more than a year out.

foota 9y ago

Seems like really low funding for what they're aiming for

platinumrad 9y ago
Yeah, I'm somewhat worried about this as well as 1.5 million is not a lot considering that they actually have to ship phones in the end and can't just pour it all into R&D. I'm assuming that they'll be using mostly commodity hardware (i.MX 8M SoC plus Alibaba-tier chassis, lcd, capacitive layer, etc.) but even then they still have to put everything together and create a deliverable product with reasonably workable software, although I expect that they plan on leaning heavily on the KDE/GNOME/Debian communities. Probably going to flip a coin later this week to determine whether I'm going to back this or not.
- JonFish85 9y ago
  $1.5m, and seemingly a team of somewhere between 18 and 27 people, they're going to need more funding. If they're paying $5k/person/mo (assume for now this includes things like taxes and overhead), that's one year's worth of money. On top of this, they have to cover things like FCC certifications, fees for getting manufacturing rolling and all the other fun stuff that comes with shipping physical product.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    $1.5m does seem like a low target for a crowdfunded smartphone, but it's worth bearing in mind that the salaries of those involved will not be propped up solely by a single device. Purism already sell a range of laptops: https://puri.sm/products/ https://puri.sm/products/
    - JepZ 9y ago
      Wow, their laptops look great. Not cheap, but fairly priced. I hope they will still offer updated versions when I have to replace my XPS.
  - 9y ago

legulere 9y ago

How to fund a good user interface and ecosystem when even Microsoft failed at that (see other article also on the top today)

ZenoArrow 9y ago
They don't have to fund that. The idea is to make use of the work of the open-source community. The main contribution, software-wise will be pushing forward Matrix, pushing forward open drivers, and designing a platform that makes it easier for others to build apps. Plasma Mobile is one example of an existing open-source project that aligns with their goals: https://plasma-mobile.org/ https://plasma-mobile.org/ Ubuntu Touch (now maintained by UBports) is another good option: https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
mattnewport 9y ago
Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI. Lack of an app ecosystem was probably Windows Phone's biggest problem. I think a possible solution to that for Purism (I was an early backer of this campaign) is to focus on web apps. I know I'm not alone in being thoroughly sick of everything about apps and app stores.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  If they have even partial support for QT and GTK they can just use existing desktop apps. Clunky, but it helps.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  >Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI You were definitely in the minority. The one common link between Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone was that hideous and universally rejected tile interface abomination. It was so vile and user hostile that Microsoft had to eventually hide it behind a button in Windows 10.
  - 9y ago

paxy 9y ago

Looking through their website I'm curious why what they're aiming for can't be accomplished with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) or a fork of it, rather than trying to build yet another smartphone ecosystem from scratch?

subway 9y ago
AOSP still relies on a bunch of hacked together BSPs with nasty binary blobs and never-ever-gonna-get-mainlined device specific kernel patches.
- scintill76 9y ago
  They could release open-source and mainlined versions of that stuff then. I guess they wouldn't because they probably consider Android incompatible with their other goals.
  - subway 9y ago
    The work they're doing is effectively that. There's nothing stopping Android from running on top of the kernel work they're doing. Think of their work as developing an open source BSP. It looks like much of the UI work is being punted to whatever phone ui the KDE and Gnome projects churn out. An Android userland will likely ship in parallel or shortly after. The bits AOSP handles are by and large boring and don't need to be futzed with.
- paxy 9y ago
  Random BSPs don't matter considering they're releasing their own hardware, and can support that as much or as little as they want on top of AOSP.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Replicant then: https://www.replicant.us/ https://www.replicant.us/
bo1024 9y ago
A huge point of their approach is the hardware.

diminish 9y ago

We really need a phone for hackers no matter how small the market is. I hope that's Librem this time after Neo, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS.

mortenjorck 9y ago
It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't. The only possibility I can imagine is that by leaning into a niche market, embracing low-volume but also the community that goes with it, rather than engaging in a quixotic quest to become a viable competitor to the established duopoly, Librem can become sustainable along the lines of niche laptop manufacturer System76. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, and it would be pretty cool.
- ralmidani 9y ago
  This. Free Software doesn't need to be ubiquitous or even dominant. Most end-users don't want Free Software right now. As long as the Librem 5 becomes feasible, we can worry about market share later.
  - bduerst 9y ago
    Isn't market share part of making the phone feasible? Economies of scale and all that.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      The costs of developing and commercializing the components in smartphones are borne by the Android, automotive, and other high performance embedded markets. They just need to make it viable enough to assemble the components and put them in an enclosure. So it's perfectly feasible to have a small market device like this if the market price covers the cost of buying chipsets off the shelf, and assembling them.
    - ralmidani 9y ago

Tepix 9y ago

Great news! I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS." The device drivers for one. I'm not aware of any Nexus device with open-source device drivers.
ramshorns 9y ago
The operating system too. CopperheadOS uses a noncommercial license, so it's not open source or free software.

JepZ 9y ago

Is there any special reason why they choose Matrix instead of XMPP?

subway 9y ago
It feels like over the past few years most of the XMPP crowd has shifted to Matrix. XMPP failed to get BOSH out the door quickly enough to maintain traction.
aloisdg 9y ago
matrix about xmpp: What is the difference between Matrix and XMPP? The Matrix team used XMPP (Openfire, ejabberd, spectrum, asmack, XMPPFramework) for IM before starting to experiment with open HTTP APIs as an alternative in around 2012. The main issues with XMPP that drove us in this direction as of 2012 were: - Not particularly web-friendly - you can’t easily speak XMPP from a web browser. N.B. Nowadays you have options like XMPP-FTW and Stanza.io that help loads with letting browsers talk XMPP - Single logical server per MUC is a single point of control and availability. MUCs can be distributed over multiple physical servers, but they still sit behind a single logical JID and domain. FMUC improves this with a similar approach to Matrix, but as of Oct 2015 there are no open source implementations. The MIX XMPP extension also aims to address this limitation. - History synchronisation is very much a second class citizen feature - Bridging to other protocols and defragmenting existing communication apps and networks is very much a second class citizen feature - Stanzas aren’t framed or reliably delivered without extensions. See wiki.xmpp.org for an XMPP take on this - Multiple device support is limited. Carbons and MAM aim to resolve this - Baseline feature set is so minimal that fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common, especially as interoperability profiles for features have fallen behind (as of July 2015) - No strong identity system (i.e. no standard E2E PKI, unless you count X.509 certs, which are questionable) - Not particularly well designed for mobile use cases: push; bandwidth-efficient transports. Since the time of writing a Push XEP has appeared, and wiki.xmpp.org states that XMPP is usable over a 9600bps + 30s latency link. This said, the whole area of XMPP vs Matrix is quite subjective. Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together. The more federation and interoperability the better. We think of Matrix and XMPP as being quite different; at its core Matrix can be thought of as an eventually consistent global JSON db with an HTTP API and pubsub semantics - whilst XMPP can be thought of as a message passing protocol. You can use them both to build chat systems; you can use them both to build pubsub systems; each comes with different tradeoffs. Matrix has a deliberately extensive ‘kitchen sink’ baseline of functionality; XMPP has a deliberately minimal baseline set of functionality. If XMPP does what you need it to do, then we’re genuinely happy for you :) Meanwhile, rather than competing, an XMPP Bridge like Skaverat’s xmpptrix beta or jfred’s matrix-xmpp-bridge or Matrix.org’s own purple-matrix has potential to let both environments coexist and make the most of each other’s benefits. source: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-xmpp https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...

kepano 9y ago

This is an admirable effort, but unless tens of thousands of units are put into production it will be very difficult to get the attention of even the smallest Chinese OEMs. It appears they've pre-sold less than 2000 units. I wonder if it would be more fruitful to work from an existing phone with solid build quality and simplifying the process of jailbreaking it and installing FOSS on it.

chx 9y ago
Separating the CPU and the baseband is going to be a challenge when building this device and impossible on any other device. But, if you want a libre phone then you must because the baseband will be a black box that's unavoidable.
j45 9y ago
Having the ability to create the first 2 or 3 waves of prototypes is nothing small. iPhone 1-3 needed improvement, similar to the galaxy note. Maybe there's a Oneplus angle here where they can start small and lean with a partner.
wvh 9y ago
Jailbreaking and installing FOSS like Jolla is doing with Sailfish on Xperia X right this week, with some help from Sony Open Devices. Still, it would be nice to have some hope do be able to do it without relying on manufacturers' goodwill... If ARM gets sufficiently commoditised so it's cheap (both time and money) enough for smaller players to create hardware, surely there must be enough open-source and/or privacy-oriented folks around to come up with a profitable product?
- cameronhowe 9y ago
  Jolla/Sailfish is not FOSS, and they have no plans to be so in the future either.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    It's still the closest option we have to "desktop linux stack running on a phone". Wayland, Qt, BTRFS, systemd, glibc...

chx 9y ago

I trust they did their research but separating the baseband from the CPU will be a major, major PITA.

closeneough 9y ago
Can you explain why?
- chx 9y ago
  Read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722515 Baseband typically uses DMA to interact with the main system.

1001101 9y ago

> Separate mobile baseband Ok, how do we know the hardware/software there pushes the goals of security and privacy? I2S hooked up? (that would scare me on a design with the stated goals, but it makes it really nice for getting good acoustics with your mechanicals) Simply pushing app processor encrypted data over the bearer? > i.MX Love the i.MX 6/8 APs, but I would recommend prototyping/de-risking the power budget up front. 100% open source warms my heart. Would love to see if this could be built.

comboy 9y ago

I imagine they cannot afford to do their own radio chip. And that's already enough to track you. Android does not seem to be the problem. When going with custom OS if this phone gets any traction then I'm pretty sure some helpful OS contributor from three-letter-agency will add something from his heart, because by running it you are already signaling that you are an interesting target.

tom_mellior 9y ago

This crowdfunding campaign started on August 24. It was at $750000 after a month on September 26, needed ten more days to reach a million on October 4, and then somehow raised the remaining $500000 in five more days? This seems weird. They didn't have that much press over this last week. I wonder if they had investors all along and only pretended to crowdfund. (I'm not saying this is a scam or anything. I participated.)

Arathorn 9y ago
My interpretation is between some concrete evidence of actually being able to build this (https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8 https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8 and https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/28/experiments-with-matrix-on-the-purism-librem5-starring-ubports-and-nheko/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/28/experiments-with-matrix-o...) and then hitting the $1M mark (https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-campaign-surges-past-one-million-dollars/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-campaign-surges-past-one-mill...), the campaign finally got critical mass. These stories seemed to get pretty major press (e.g. top of HN).
- rrix2 9y ago
  Anecdata: I only chose to back it after they reached the 1mm mark.
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    Fair enough. Though now that the campaign has really achieved critical mass, is fully funded, and further people could buy in ostensibly without any risk... it has stagnated at 107% and not moved in at least 24 hours.
shmerl 9y ago
They got more publicity from Gnome and KDE backing the project.
__d 9y ago
I suspect that at first people held back, fearing that the project would be limited to the i.MX6 CPU, wouldn't get a critical mass, etc. As the funding threshold neared, confidence grew, and more people signed up. It might also just have taken people a week or two to decide to commit a bunch of money to a 15-months away delivery ...

pacala 9y ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a solution to run https://signal.org https://signal.org and nothing else? 5 out of 7 days I don't really need a smart phone, I only need the signal app. Working to break my smart phone addiction.

j45 9y ago
You could run a tablet data plan sim (data only) in a mobile phone.
maerF0x0 9y ago
maybe build one w/ raspberry pi?
skymt 9y ago
If you're just looking for something to help with self-control, start by setting up parental controls on your phone. Having to tap in a lengthy passphrase to access apps not on your approved list breaks the instant feedback that feeds phone addiction.

shmerl 9y ago

Congratulations! I'm looking forward to the actual release. It's quite hard and risky however, and if anything, previous failed projects are an indication of how volatile all this is (like hardware partners pulling support in the middle of the development cycle and so on). It would be great to have a device running Linux with native Wayland, and LTE modem separated from the CPU for better security. I just hope they'll go with i.MX 8M so it will be 64-bit. How is etnaviv for it though? I also wonder what's the level of OpenGL support in it. I suppose Vulkan support isn't even started?

starkruzr 9y ago
I've always wondered why open phone hardware is universally terrible in terms of capability and performance.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Because no one made good ones open? ARM based SoC manufacturers have historically abysmal record of opening anything up. It's a pity AMD and Intel didn't break into making good mobile CPUs and GPUs.
petecox 9y ago
Th most interesting thing for me about i.MX is not 4K video or Vulkan. Quite the opposite. It is the chip powering my Kobo and, I suspect, Kindles. An e-ink phone with a 3 day battery life! But being a hacker phone, as long as performance isn't too shabby when docked to a regular 3D accelerated LED monitor with Wayland desktop would be a nice balance.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Good graphics stack is quite important too. I suppose they can crowdfund missing OpenGL and Vulkan support for etnaviv. I'd support such effort.

rallycarre 9y ago

Doesn't matter. They'll be a gov't backdoor in either the hardware or the software so you might as well get an android phone and load copperhead os on it as it will have the same result.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
The Librem laptops come with hardware killswitches. The aim is to do the same with the Librem 5. Kind of hard for governments to spy on you using a microphone, camera, etc... without electricity.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Kinda hard to use the phone too, without electricity.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    With the proposed design for the Librem 5, you can turn off the individual features of the phone without turning off the phone. So for example, you can turn off the camera (with a hardware switch, which is not something that can be overridden remotely) whilst still being able to browse the web. As far as I know there are no other modern phones with that feature.

maerF0x0 9y ago

Will it have a GPS?

sipos 9y ago
The page says yes, it is included in the list of sensors. Whether they can deliver what they promise (I imagine GPS will not be the stumbling block here) is not certain of course, so I can't say "Yes - it will have GPS" with certainty.

greenhouse_gas 9y ago

Why don't they base their OS on Replicant? It's FOSS, Linux-based, has apps and is Mobike-optimized.

uabstraction 9y ago
I don't know about you, but I want to get as far away from the whole Android ecosystem as possible. I don't want "Linux-based." I want fully fledged GNU/Linux in my pocket. I want to take advantage of GNOME/KDE's convergence interfaces. I want to develop real Unix software and port it to a phone without rewriting it for cocoa touch or Android's java API. There is so much great software available for GNU/Linux that we have the potential to tap into, and many of them can be made to work on a 5" touchscreen with a little bit of elbow grease. Firefox OS and Ubuntu phones failed because they ignored the giant stack of software sitting right in front of us. Purism would do well to leverage the software we already have and love, rather than wasting time designing new application models and distribution channels which nobody asked for in the first place. There's been a hole in my heart since the day the Nokia n900 was discontinued. I've got my fingers crossed on this one.

c0smic 9y ago

Really hope purism finds success with this. An open phone platform has been a long time coming, I hope they can learning from the missteps of ubuntu and firefox. I like the idea of managing my phone like I manage my computer; install whatever OS and software I want on it. Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated and working, and if this is a primary communication device that effort becomes more urgent. But hey, I think that's just what it takes to not be dependent on a corporation that takes my data/info in exchange for device support.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
> Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated Yeah, but you actually get the option, and you, the owner of the device, have the power to make it happen.
- gehsty 9y ago
  Crowd funded, then crowd sourced security updates? Really? I think it is a noble effort with zero chance of success, its like Linux on the desktop, but with the further complication of expecting people to pay $$$ for out of date hardware, with what will no doubt be terrible software, with no apps users actually want to use....
  - bostand 9y ago
    Define success. Btw, Linux on desktop is used by many large tech companies...
    - gehsty 9y ago
      Used by a significant portion of computer users, ie Windows Phone is not a successful platform, Android is, and if Microsoft can't make a successful phone platform, what chance does this go fund me campaign have. 'Many large tech companies' is pretty insignificant when you look at the number of people who use desktop computers, and then even more insignificant when you look at the number of people who use phones, and is a very poor metric as it doesn't really consider people actually choosing to purchase the system when others are on offer. There is just no value in their proposition to consumers... Have an expensive old phone, made by a company that can in no way support your purchase should the hardware fail... And I don't believe for a second that it will be more secure than iOS or even Android. Small team, custom operating system, the user can install their own OS, sounds like a recipe for disaster.

mikenew 9y ago

I "bought" mine. I'm not sure what their probability of success is, but if it's around 30% or so I'm fine with that. The world needs a viable alternative to the big 2 mobile OSs, and even if the market share is tiny the difference between having an alternative and not is huge. I've been an iOS developer for years and made a comfortable living, but it bothers me on a deep and fundamental level that my primary communication and computing device is controlled by someone else, and the software I'm allowed to run and allowed to distribute is entirely decided by them. I'm willing to risk money if it helps our chances of having an alternative.

shmerl 9y ago
We have free mobile OSes, but what's much harder is hardware where they can run.

cordite 9y ago

I hope it works better than the blackphone. I could barely use it for a year before the basic functionalities like battery life were impractacle.

andrefreitas 9y ago

Seems a good phone for those that use Smartphones and have concerns about privacy issues. In term of applications, is a phone focused in a particular ecosystem: Matrix for encrypted communications and HTML5 Apps. Maybe it will suffer from the same pain as Ubuntu Phone? No native Apps being developed by major Companies? Maybe is a tradeoff that users can live with.

rrix2 9y ago
There's also plans to port KDE's mobile stack (including PIM suite) to the librem's operating system, providing at least one fairly comprehensive set of software. Your bank probably won't ever have an app running on it though, you're right. I think most mobile apps that people use elsewise have decent enough PWAs that it won't be such an issue as long as PWAs are well supported at the UI layer.
- petecox 9y ago
  Anbox.io is in its infancy - run Android apps in an LXC container.

sipos 9y ago

It is annoying that they cannot be more committed to open hardware. (I'm not saying they should be). I appreciate that they probably can't commit to it at this stage, but the fact that their laptops are not does not inspire confidence that the noises they make about trying will come to fruition.

gabryys 9y ago

> A fully standards-based freedom-oriented system, based on Debian and many other upstream projects, has never been done before–we will be the first to seriously attempt this What about OpenMoko?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bitmapbrother 9y ago

Is the cell radio firmware also going to be open source? And if not why are they making claims of user privacy when they cannot guarantee the capabilities of some binary blob they have no control over?

rrix2 9y ago
By decoupling the baseband from the CPU so that it can't directly access the OS's memory+busses and securing communication on the wire (defaulting to secure messaging over Matrix, and using SSL everywhere) so that it can't be sniffed in transit by the modem. I'm guessing that what this ends up looking like is a USB modem talking to the OS with pppd or a similar model that also enables voice calls over LTE
popopo1 9y ago
Legally speaking you are not allowed to run one

jordigh 9y ago

I haven't had a phone mostly because I refuse to have any non-free software controlling my life. I don't want to be tracked, manipulated, or have a computer attached to me at all times with a second, hidden computer inside that can do things I don't want it to do nor can even know about. I'm excited about Librem, if it is what I think it will be: a phone I can completely trust. I'm also extremely surprised that it got funded. 1.5e6 USD is not a modest goal given how stingy we usually are about freedom-respecting projects.

zanybear 9y ago

If Microsoft would support this from a distance - thru open source and maybe some financing - this would be their best play in the mobile space. They would achieve way more than Windows Mobile ever did.

quickben 9y ago
Ms doesn't enter markets where they have no control (OSS or closed ecosystems).

noncoml 9y ago

Jan 2019 seems a bit aggressive. If they do manage to pull it off thought, even for a later date, I will be definitely placing an order as soon as possible.

kakarot 9y ago

> CPU separate from Baseband How separate?

fghtr 9y ago

Why hasn't neo900 [0] been successful so far in comparison with the Lbrem 5? Are there any drawbacks in the former? [0] https://neo900.org https://neo900.org

pedroaraujo 9y ago
To be honest, the communication of the neo900 project is not that good. They only made two updates during the entire year of 2017 and even those don't say much about what exactly they have been doing all this time. I'm not implying that they have been fooling around with the money but it gives me the impression that they are not good at planning things and communicating with people.

nitin_flanker 9y ago

Anybody aware of the exact specifications? For camera, screen resolution, battery? I love the concept but being an average smartphone user I'm sure many people, like me, would like to know more about the basic things that we use everyday (camera for example).

onion2k 9y ago
There aren't any specs. This project is to design and build a privacy-oriented phone; it's not at the point where anything is settled on yet (afaik).

earlybike 9y ago

I'd love to have a BlackBerry-style phone with a keyboard and all main features are shell-based and implemented in a POSIX-like manner (with an optional GUI on top). But I think this will never happen.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hathym 9y ago

Would be much much easier if they built the OS for current hardware.. I don't understand why they need to build their own

Brakenshire 9y ago
A phone that runs on the mainline kernel is the key part of this project, the software is secondary.
ptman 9y ago
please point out sufficiently open hardware

noxecanexx 9y ago

Does anyone know what they mean by support now and pay later

r3bl 9y ago
It means you select the amount of money and they deduct it from your account once the crowdfunding is done. Before they've reached their goal, it was an "all-or-nothing" campaign, so the backers wouldn't lose any money if the goal was not reached.

hasteur 9y ago

Great... yet annother Open OS phone/computer. Not like that's been done before to "great acclaim". Anybody remember Jolla, the SailfishOS, and the Jolla Tablet?

s0me0ne 9y ago

I wonder why none of the feature phone OSes have been open sourced? Is it because they only work on the one device they were installed on? Cricket and all the other feature phones before smartphones had tons of Operating Systems, maybe that would give people a head start?