
Purism Librem 5 Pre Order - ctulek
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
======
y0ghur7_xxx
I will buy it and I am sure I'm gonna love it. I will feel good having it in
my pocket and knowing nobody gets my data if it's not me giving it to them. I
will develop software for it and I hope others will too. I really hope THIS is
the future of personal mobile devices, and I want to help make that happen.

~~~
hutzlibu
I don't want to spoil your enthusiasm, but how do you know that?

"and knowing nobody gets my data if it's not me giving it to them"

As far as I know, the hardware is not open source, nor is the firmware.

So it is a nice step in the right direction, but we are not there yet.

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
> So it is a nice step in the right direction, but we are not there yet.

Even if it's not perfect, it's like a million times better than everything
else around.

Perfection will come. Maybe.

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mark_l_watson
I used to be skeptical of non-mainstream products like this. Late last year I
bought a Linux laptop from System76 that was by far the most expensive laptop
I have ever bought (mostly because it has a 1070 GPU for machine learning) but
so far it has been a great experience.

I love my iPhone/Apple Watch combination with perfect interop with my MacBook
but I can see myself buying something like a Librem 5 in the future. The
biggest drawback would be giving up my Apple Watch: it has been a game changer
for me to be able to leave my cellphone at home, sort of disconnected but
people can still get ahold of me while I don’t spend time staring at my phone
instead of enjoying the world around me.

I would like more information about hooking a Librem 5 up to a monitor and
Bluetooth keyboard. Even with a lower power phone, for me it is a compelling
idea to have just one device.

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solarkraft
I love that it exists, but I don't think I'll buy one. The processor having
half the power of my 2016 mid-range phone is concerning me a little,
especially for the price.

I hope they keep developing because I really do want a linux phone, but with
enough power to emulate Android somehow (just can't go around it for some
things).

Again though, congratulations for making it this far. The Librem 5 will
probably be the standard hacker-phone for a few years.

~~~
benj111
I suppose it depends what you do with your phone?

Even with a slower processor I have no problems believing it may be better for
certain workloads because you won't have a load of background tasks running,
that don't need to etc. Will probably be worse for games though.

So the same situation that desktop Linux was in, in the naughties?

Thinking about your Android emulator. That should be fairly easy? Android is
already basically a VM running on Linux. I'm sure Google will be working hard
to prevent this use case though.

~~~
holri
Jolla Phone already had a Android emulation for Sailfish OS

~~~
solarkraft
Alien Dalvik is a great idea and theoretically works well, but it's
proprietary software and its developers don't seem to have any interest in
anyone actually using it.

There doesn't seem to be any free software effort in prong porting ART to a
real linux system (which shouldn't be hard at all), which could've happened
for years and I'm not sure (though shyly hopeful) the Librem 5 will change
anything about that (so the only realistic option would be full emulation,
which would require a good bit of power).

Edit: Just realized that you could theoretically run Android apps via Chrome.
But shit, that'll be slow.

~~~
joshumax
You should check out Anbox. It's basically a containerization platform for
Linux that hosts an Android userspace and shares your host kernel a la docker.
All you need to do is load the ashmem and binder kernel modules or build them
statically into your kernel.

So far I know that there's an Ubuntu touch port of Anbox that works. It's a
pretty good all-around solution considering the low container overhead and
support for OpenGL ES 2.0

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mehrdadn
Are we expected to order the phone without knowing its features/specs...? I
can't find them.

~~~
buovjaga
I found them: [https://puri.sm/faq/#faq-
Whatarethephonespecs](https://puri.sm/faq/#faq-Whatarethephonespecs)

Edit: argh, I think their lazy-loading breaks the anchor link browsing
position. I will just paste the contents here:

Development is still ongoing, so most of the specs are not finalized yet. What
is certain at this moment is:

CPU: NXP® i.MX 8M Quad or NXP® i.MX 8M Quad Mini

GPU: Vivante GC7000Lite

RAM: 3 GB minimum (subject to change)

Screen: 720×1440 high-DPI 5.7″ (glossy)

WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n

Bluetooth: Yes

GPS: Yes

NFC: No (subject to change)

FM Radio: No

Card slot: microSD

Loudspeaker: Yes

3.5mm jack: Yes

SIM cards: One

Camera: Front and back

Replaceable Battery: Yes (with tools)

Smart Card Reader: Yes (OpenPGP-compatible)

Everything else is To Be Determined. This applies to: dimensions, weight,
supported modem frequencies, internal storage capacity, maximum SD card
capacity, camera specs, other screen specs, battery life, SAR values, etc.

~~~
Kudos
Anyone know what the purpose of a "Smart Card Reader" is on a phone like this?
I hadn't heard of OpenPGP smart cards before, are they similar to the PGP
subset of functionality on Yubikeys?

~~~
AsyncAwait
> are they similar to the PGP subset of functionality on Yubikeys?

Yes. I understand it as providing something akin to the "secure enclave" on
the iPhone.

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Improvotter
This phone is something I'd see myself using in the future. This way you could
really have a Linux desktop/laptop machine for work and a Linux phone where
it's a lot easier to bridge the gap between the devices. Imagine the ability
to use most of the features of your phone from a Linux PC like MacOS has some
features of: quick Bluetooth tethering, USB tethering, answering to messages,
calling someone, and more! But it's missing some key features imo like
responding to phone notifications from your desktop, using IR blaster, using
the Bluetooth on your phone if your PC doesn't have it, sleep mode that's
synced, and so so so much more that I cannot even think of.

But for now, I cannot afford a phone like this. Not only because of its price
for what you get. But also because I want my phone to "just work".

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nixpulvis
I believe we've found our next phone! Replaceable battery, headphone jack,
Linux support. Hello, indeeed.

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lettergram
That’s actually a pretty expensive phone: $600. I think it’s a fair
proposition given what they are offering and attempting, but in this post they
provide none of the phone specs. I suppose it’s not their target, but should
probably still list it.

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NedIsakoff
"Upon initial shipment of the Librem 5 in 2019, it will offer the essentials:
phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing. The featureset
will expand after shipment and over time to more free software applications.
Your user experience will improve as we incrementally add commonly requested
applications and features (such as calendaring, notes, calculator, PDF viewer,
etc.) while keeping performance in mind."

A phone without a PDF viewer or calendar app? :)

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lucb1e
I wonder why they very carefully avoid giving a hard minimum for how long the
software will actually be supported. "For years to come" could be a third of
your device's physical lifetime like everyone else does.

~~~
turblety
Maybe it's because the phone's just running Linux. I believe [1] they have
upstreamed a lot of their work into the kernel and Gnome so really as long as
those projects keep going it should be fine.

1\. [https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-2018-11-hardware-
report/](https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-2018-11-hardware-report/)

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secfirstmd
I love this idea but without Signal and Whatsapp I basically will have a phone
but no one to actually communicate with on it. Matrix is great but it's UI/UX
needs work and barely anyone is using it.

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NedIsakoff
Real question: does anyone see anywhere on the site where they say what
LTE/3G/GSM bands it supports? Or TD-LTE vs FD-LTE?

I like to know before I pre-order if it will work in my region.

~~~
socceroos
The device uses one of SIMCom SIM7100E or SIM7100A WWAN module.

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Something1234
Anybody know if this phone will be able to work on Sprint's network in the
United States? It's always a pain to get BYOD to work with a lot of the
carriers.

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wpdev_63
Is the baseband firmware open source?

It would be exciting to have an open source phone based on the risc-v
processor. Until the hardware is open source, it will never be truly secure.

~~~
jsiepkes
iirc its not (simply because there is no oss baseband) but they went through
great lengths to isolate the basebands chips from the rest of the phone.
Greatly neutralising the threat the it can pose. In normal phone designs the
baseband has unfeathered access to everything.

~~~
tptacek
... you mean, like flagship commercial phones already do? Because, no, it's no
the case that iPhones basebands have unfettered access to everything: the
iPhone baseband is a USB peripheral.

~~~
AsyncAwait
And the iPhone is one of the few phones that do this.

The main selling point of the Librem5 however is that it is not a restricted
platform like iOS is, baseband separation is just a nice bonus, (plus hw kill
switches).

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mac01021
Does this come with the same gnome 3 that I would install on a desktop?

Can I make apps that look consistent with the rest of the phone's OS just by
using GTK?

~~~
solarkraft
No and kind of.

It ships with a custom Wayland compositor built with GNOME technology, but
theoretically you could install GNOME. They have a custom widget library, but
that builds on GTK.

