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Ha, Openmoko Neo Freerunner was my first smartphone :) It managed to play the role of "livable-with phone" well enough for me though (but not without some effor

Ha, Openmoko Neo Freerunner was my first smartphone :) It managed to play the role of "livable-with phone" well enough for me though (but not without some effort of course). Then moved to Nokia N900 and only now I'm switching from it to Librem 5.

pengaru 6y ago
> now I'm switching from it to Librem 5 Do you actually have the Librem 5 yet? Based on the mediocre battery life I'm hearing about on the mntre reform 2, and the need for such a heat sink there, I'm very curious what the Librem 5 situation is. They share a common SoC.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  Yes. I have backed it during the original crowdfunding and since a year ago I'm actually working on it at Purism. The battery life and thermals got much better in the last few months, and there's still plenty of stuff to improve on in the software stack there. With my early batch unit with smaller battery (2000mAh) I'm now able to reach 6h of idle time with modem and WiFi on without utilizing CPU suspend at all (so the phone stays reachable all that time and you can, say, ssh into it - the high figures from the PinePhone blog post rely on putting the phone into suspend). There's still plenty of work left, but I'm pretty happy with how usable Librem 5 comes to be right now. iMX.8M can be a power and thermal hog, that's right, but once you tame it in the kernel it becomes much more approachable ;)
Nursie 6y ago
Wow you kept that N900 alive for a long time! Mine effectively died after about three years, the USB charging port came loose and the only way I had to charge it was removing the battery and charging externally. The freerunner was just a little too pre-market for me. I remember installing various different OS and frontend packages and trying lots of things out. It would have been fine but for one failing - whatever I installed, incoming calls would often just be silent. A phone that can't take calls is a step too far!
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  Well, I have cheated a bit, it's a third one if I count right and I still have some spares... :D Freerunner sure needed some attention to make it work, but with workarounds and hw fixes for the infamous #1024 and call buzz issues it was a pretty great device. I would have used it longer if not for unbearable GPU performance that drove me towards N900 (damned glamo :))
zem 6y ago
whoa! I had to give up on my n900 in 2012, when it was clear they were not going to fix two major bugs (GPS often never got a lock, and calls got dropped because the phone app took so long to swap in). it was still one of the best phones I've ever had though; I'm looking forward to seeing what the pinephone can do.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  FWIW the swapping issue was massively improved by CSSU-Thumb community update, and AFAIR GPS just needed a correct SUPL server to be set, since the Nokia's one had a SSL certificate that expired soon after the official support has ended.
  - zem 6y ago
    good to hear about the swapping issue, but the gps definitely have any simple fixes - i spent a good while trawling through forums and trying out various suggestions (i'm pretty sure changing the supl server was one of them), and none of them worked for me.
    - seba_dos1 6y ago
      I sure remember getting AGPS to work by running a SUPL proxy on my own server, but I have no idea whether that was a simplest solution or that I simply wanted to play with running a SUPL proxy :P

pengaru 6y ago

> now I'm switching from it to Librem 5 Do you actually have the Librem 5 yet? Based on the mediocre battery life I'm hearing about on the mntre reform 2, and the need for such a heat sink there, I'm very curious what the Librem 5 situation is. They share a common SoC.

seba_dos1 6y ago
Yes. I have backed it during the original crowdfunding and since a year ago I'm actually working on it at Purism. The battery life and thermals got much better in the last few months, and there's still plenty of stuff to improve on in the software stack there. With my early batch unit with smaller battery (2000mAh) I'm now able to reach 6h of idle time with modem and WiFi on without utilizing CPU suspend at all (so the phone stays reachable all that time and you can, say, ssh into it - the high figures from the PinePhone blog post rely on putting the phone into suspend). There's still plenty of work left, but I'm pretty happy with how usable Librem 5 comes to be right now. iMX.8M can be a power and thermal hog, that's right, but once you tame it in the kernel it becomes much more approachable ;)

Nursie 6y ago

Wow you kept that N900 alive for a long time! Mine effectively died after about three years, the USB charging port came loose and the only way I had to charge it was removing the battery and charging externally. The freerunner was just a little too pre-market for me. I remember installing various different OS and frontend packages and trying lots of things out. It would have been fine but for one failing - whatever I installed, incoming calls would often just be silent. A phone that can't take calls is a step too far!

seba_dos1 6y ago
Well, I have cheated a bit, it's a third one if I count right and I still have some spares... :D Freerunner sure needed some attention to make it work, but with workarounds and hw fixes for the infamous #1024 and call buzz issues it was a pretty great device. I would have used it longer if not for unbearable GPU performance that drove me towards N900 (damned glamo :))

zem 6y ago

whoa! I had to give up on my n900 in 2012, when it was clear they were not going to fix two major bugs (GPS often never got a lock, and calls got dropped because the phone app took so long to swap in). it was still one of the best phones I've ever had though; I'm looking forward to seeing what the pinephone can do.

seba_dos1 6y ago
FWIW the swapping issue was massively improved by CSSU-Thumb community update, and AFAIR GPS just needed a correct SUPL server to be set, since the Nokia's one had a SSL certificate that expired soon after the official support has ended.
- zem 6y ago
  good to hear about the swapping issue, but the gps definitely have any simple fixes - i spent a good while trawling through forums and trying out various suggestions (i'm pretty sure changing the supl server was one of them), and none of them worked for me.
  - seba_dos1 6y ago
    I sure remember getting AGPS to work by running a SUPL proxy on my own server, but I have no idea whether that was a simplest solution or that I simply wanted to play with running a SUPL proxy :P