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Librem5 Hardware Update
- leeoniya 8y agoi wonder if smaller screen variants will ever be on the radar. i'm on a bootloader-unlocked, rooted, lineageos sony z5 compact (4.6" 720p display) that you'd have to pry from my cold dead hands. but i would love to buy a small hackable, privacy-first phone with open hardware instead. i imagine pcb layout becomes a much harder and more expensive problem at small sizes, not to mention most people wouldn't touch "only" a 720p display in 2019, even at a 4.6" display size (unfort), even if you told them it adds 30% battery life.
- steanne 8y agoagreed. i just replaced the battery on my z1 compact, it's still fine.
- mackrevinack 8y agoill be sticking with the xz1 compact 4life! (or at least until someone makes something the same size, waterproof, with a headphone jack, camera button, notch-less and a fingerprint scanner on the side. so not very likely the way things are going :)
- LMYahooTFY 8y agoI just sent mine in for (hopefully) warranty replacement, I've never had a phone I loved more. Lots of power, easy to handle, and I don't think about battery life ever. If they don't replace it, I'm just going to buy another. I was very sad to see they increased the screen size and resolution on the new models.
- cbcoutinho 8y agoI've been completely impressed with the Sony compact phones - I just got my second one a few months ago and I have no plans to move back to the larger form factor of current flagships
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> Almost right after that was a Chinese holiday, the Golden Week, which is in practice a two week holiday. This doesn't match with my experience. Golden Week is a one-week holiday that gets you less than 5 days of vacation, because -- although companies are legally required to give Monday through Friday off -- the norm is to work on weekends around the holiday to make up for the lost time. Does anyone have an idea what sort of Golden Week implementation Purism ran into? Why is it so different?
- gcb0 8y agoChina is a very big country.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoTrue enough. What Golden Week practices have you encountered?
- ethbro 8y agoI'd be interested in hearing anyone's experience with holidays and China B2B. Is it just kind of known that things stop there for certain weeks? Or are these formally set out in schedules? My only experience has been B2C, where the experience is generally {no response} -> {a week later: "Oh, everyone was on holiday"}
- phh 8y agoWell everyone there has the same holidays, and yes they mostly assume everyone they work with are well aware of it. So just ask them nicely every three months what are their next holidays
- phh 8y agoMy experience with ODMs at Shenzhen was that it's usually ten days for engineers. Could be down to one week when production was halted. But yeah that means workers only had 7 days. I didn't witness five days though. And they shut down power for the whole building, so people couldn't really get there early
- faragon 8y agoKudos. The most interesting thing in smartphones for my needs since the Nokia N900, not counting the SailfishOS efforts. I'll buy one if it works "a la Maemo" (Debian derivative).
- craftyguy 8y agoTheir OS, PureOS, is a Debian derivative.
- wetpaws 8y ago>18650 battery I am tired of subpar battery life being a de facto industry standard
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- remlov 8y agoI am almost certain that battery only applies to the dev board for testing and development. There is no way a 18650 is going to fit in the final Librem 5 product.
- amelius 8y agoDoes it have a hardware switch to turn off the mic and camera?
- curioussavage 8y agoim Pretty sure it does
- blihp 8y agoYes. You can see the switch on the side render here: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/
- amelius 8y agoAh that's great!
- zlatan_todoric 8y agoThose are just mockups and not the end product which might heavily change due to various things.
- blihp 8y agoOf course. But you can see three switches on the side of dev boards which would seem to indicate that this part of the plan hasn't changed. (yet)
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoWhen you think about it, it amazes me. So many people, including me, would love to have these switches. Like physical switch for the mic, camera and radio. And yet, the companies that are supposed to listen to the customer seem to do exactly the opposite to what the customer wants, like installing all these unremovable crappy apps nobody uses or removeing the headphone jack. Are these people so out of touch with reality?
- eudora 8y ago
- amelius 8y agoI'm quite impressed by their company manifesto: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/ https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/ More companies should follow this example.
- lvs 8y agoIndeed. This is an encouraging idea. But in a broader sense -- applied to a whole sector of corporations, for example -- I'm curious how legally enforceable this kind of charter is, under the cited statute or under other laws governing incorporation. Under what conditions can articles of incorporation be changed? Can't their investors force such a change? If so, it seems a large burden must be placed on choosing investors who are somehow legally bound under similar rules. And what mechanism of enforcement exists? Presumably investor lawsuits are the main mechanism, which again puts a large burden on finding investors whose goals are not returns maximization. If this state statute specifies a distinct tax classification, perhaps there would then be state-level prosecutorial or administrative enforcement.
- curioussavage 8y agoFor the last few months I have been super excited about the Librem 5. I check way too often for their updates. Maybe I’m alone but I wish I had more visibility into their progress. Might not be helpful for them though.
- greenhatman 8y agoI really want a Linux phone that has the same kind of specs and build quality as Samsung flagship phones.
- ethbro 8y agoHope you're willing to pay $x0,000 to amortize the design / code / build cost over a smaller-than-Samsung userbase then.
- curioussavage 8y agoI’m not so worried about that any more. But if the premium hardware is what you want I’d support postmarketOS.
- curioussavage 8y agoI also wish they would embrace Vala as the language for the apps. ElementaryOS has had pretty decent success so far building an app ecosystem and the choice of Vala has contributed to that
- yogthos 8y agoIt’s hard to overstate how important Librem phone is. Currently, it’s pretty much impossible to buy a high end phone that you can actually own. All Android based phones have their firmware locked and root access disabled. This effectively means that you do not own the device, and you don’t get the final say as to what will be running on it. I’m aware that it’s possible to crack the firmware, but I think that’s completely beside the point. We desperately need an open alternative that puts control back in the hands of the user. I think open computing is of fundamental importance. If we lose the ability to decide what code runs on our devices, we’ll be moving a step closer towards a totalitarian dystopia where the governments and corporations get to decide what’s good for us.
- floatboth 8y ago> crack the firmware In most cases, you don't have to crack anything, you can officially unlock the bootloader and flash your own OS build. Yes, you can't touch the early boot initialization, you're still required to use vendor blobs for using wireless/modem/camera/etc things, but you can control most of the software that matters.
- djsumdog 8y agoYea using adb/oemunlock. Sometimes you have to get a code (like with Sony, you input your IMEI number into their website and get one). I've had one Sony that was unlockable; a condition of the original cell provider. Still, it's bizarre considering you can install Linux on any PC/laptop you buy. The bigger issue of course, is that you can't just install Linux on a phone. They're all random pins soldered to random chips and all use patched to hell Kernels with binary blobs. Linux distros can release images that are designed on boot on x86/x86_64/PPC/Sparc and they'll booth up and install on most of those machines. That's impossible with nearly all Android/ARM devices. PostmarketOS is trying to change that from the other direction, but Librem is a huge step in giving developers embedded hardware that doesn't require carefully modified and patched kernels/bootloaders.
- ascii_only 8y ago
- zlatan_todoric 8y agoWhile the Librem5 is step into right direction, it is far away from open hardware and will likely need even software proprietary bits - so I would recommend to stay in realistic zone and help the project in any way you can.
- floatboth 8y ago> software proprietary bits Only the DDR4 memory training blob (which someone could eventually rewrite).
- conradev 8y agoWhere are they getting the LTE baseband software from?
- pedrocr 8y agoThey're not of course. They just treat the modem as walled off peripheral black box like all the other rest of the hardware. They may load firmware on boot for LTE/Wifi/Bluetooth like most Linux laptops do. Depending on your opinion on the topic that may be free enough or not but it should be safe as none of those can access the CPU/RAM directly.
- conradev 8y agoI see. The question here is not if there will be proprietary software: there will be. The question is which of that proprietary software runs on the CPU. Is the idea that all of the software in the kernel to interface with these devices is open source? I also don’t get the hangup over PCIe (vs USB). DMA with an IOMMU can be made fairly secure (and has obvious perf benefits).
- cyphar 8y agoI think the main reason is that powering off a device (for their hardware kill switches) connected via USB is more reliable than powering off a device connected via PCIe. There's also just more layers of security when using USB as opposed to a single layer with PCIe (IOMMU -- which is secure as far as I know but I'd prefer to be safe rather than sorry in this case).
- newnewpdro 8y agoWhy is there a substantial heat sink on what's supposed to be packaged down to the size of a smartphone?
- craftyguy 8y agoBecause it's a platform under active development, and they're probably more concerned with functionality than some super sexy tiny cooling solution? At some point they'll most likely test the production cooling system, but for now it probably doesn't matter. You'd be surprised how many things (cooling, PCBs, etc) are much larger early on than their production counterparts...
- ethbro 8y agoSoftware perspective: Fatal error, I'll just make a change and recompile. Hardware perspective: CPU cooked itself because frequency regulation was accidentally turned off, time to wait for new parts from China + assembly. It always amuses me how laisez faire folks are about things like ESD. "It's never caused a problem before" isn't a reason to ignore best practices and not work defensively.
- Kenji 8y ago> "It's never caused a problem before" isn't a reason to ignore best practices and not work defensively. It is if working defensively is costlier than replacing the odd broken part.
- newnewpdro 8y agoSo the i.MX 8M SoM package will be smaller and dissipate less heat in the final handset? I wouldn't expect the same chip going into a smartphone to require a heatsink or any thermal consideration at all on a sparsely populated, open-air circuit board.
- craftyguy 8y agoIt could be that power management is not enabled yet, or perhaps other thermal protections are not fully enabled yet. I doubt the SoM package itself will get much smaller, but I'm just basically guessing since I'm not an employee of Purism.
- rocky1138 8y agoI don't really have anything of value to add to the conversation, but in case the Librem5 team is here I just wanted to thank you for your work and applaud your openness to the current status of everything. Another project which is taking on a similar challenge and is similarly open is the Dragonbox Pyra.
- fghtr 8y agoAnd one more project is https://neo900.org https://neo900.org.
- pessimizer 8y agoIt's dead, and I'm pretty sure all of the cash has been spent.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 8y ago> and is similarly open is the Dragonbox Pyra The Pyra is taking forever and it's pretty much a one-two men's team, which is why it takes so long I guess.
- rocky1138 8y agoIt is taking forever, yes. Unfortunate as the hardware will be out-of-date by the time it is actually fully released. Still, it'll be fast enough for its purposes and will really be a triumph for Michael Mrozek. It's amazing that he's been able to do all this.
- ekianjo 8y agoThe problem is that there are now alternatives out there like the GPD-Win 2 and GPD Pocket, which are way more "open" (and actually using the mainline kernel now) than the Pyra can ever hope to be (The Pyra will use to use a number of binary blobs to function. Such as the GPU support...). Of course, the GPD may be inferior in some aspects, but they release hardware very quickly and the market is pretty much captured by their efforts.
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoAny experiences with their laptops?
- bo1024 8y agoI like mine (a 13). Hardware seems very solid, battery life is good. Screen, keyboard, touchpad are fine for me (some people are very picky about these things). Having the kilswitches for mike/camera and wireless/bluetooth are nice. I was on a 2013 13" MacBook Pro previously (an amazing piece of hardware as well) and can't say I miss it. The only thing I miss actually is the 16x10 aspect ratio of the MBP, where the Librem like all other laptops I know of is 16x9. Software-wise I've stuck to PureOS (which is Debian-based) despite temptations to install Arch or something. It's worked fine for me.
- portroyal 8y agoTyping to you from a Librem 13 that I've owned for ~3 weeks. So far, the hardware is stellar. I can't say the same for PureOS, I replaced that after ~36h (never made it to desktop). Battery life is consistently ~8-9h. The machine is more powerful than the desktop I replaced it with -- that box is basically NAS now. Would I buy again? Yes, for the ethos. Would I recommend it to a casual user (the intended audience)? No. It's still very much a techie device. If I push the power button and don't see desktop within a minute, that's broken. You need to be comfy at the command line to maneouver -- which I notice has been almost entirely convenienced away in Fedora 29. If Librems shipped F29, I could at least recommend it for my partner who is the definition of a casual computer user.
- Trailerhouse 8y agoHate to be the party pooper here but does anyone believe this thing will ship in January?
- Galanwe 8y agoAs an expat living in HK, I did not quite understand the explanations about delays at the beginning of the article. The golden week is Japanese, not Chinese. Nothing closes in China at that time. And it’s in may/april. Mangkhut did not really hit China mainland, it was already mainly just a storm when it reached mainland, and it died in 1/2 days once leaving the sea. I guess most of the factories are near Shenzhen, they should not have really suffered from Manghkut. Just wanted to rectify that...
- Arnavion 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Week_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Week_(China) >The "National Day Golden Week" begins around 1 October. >Three days of paid holiday are given, and the surrounding weekends are re-arranged so that workers in Chinese companies always have seven continuous days of holiday.