April 2021 Librem 5 News Summary | Hacker News Reader

April 2021 Librem 5 News Summary

puri.sm

48 pointsblendergeek16 comments

The lede buried here is that production of Librem 5 is discontinued until October. Purism has this nice racket going where they won't offer refunds until your order is up, but now people who put in money over a year ago still can't get a phone or their money back and the window of time before they can make this claim is now pushed all the way back until at least October.

It's hard to sympathize with Purism here. Supply chain has gotten quite messed up thanks to the pandemic, but there's little excuse to treat your customers this way. It goes beyond negligence and into contempt, if you ask me. The least they could do is put that at the front and center of their update, and offer folks who may want refunds to get out early.

The kicker is that if you order the $2000 variant (because who doesn't love paying more for a low-end phone than they do a couple months rent) their production is still at the same capacity.

It's a bit odd that they're focusing on Matrix rather than MMS in chatty. MMS is the big issue everyone has with it and there are patches to fix it, matrix clients already exist for Linux.

Other than that this is supper exciting!

On my current plan MMS cost about 50ct US. I am in Germany, I use matrix, so Purism’s priorities align with mine here. Let’s also not forget that good Matrix support was promised in the Librem 5 campaign, where the phone was marketed as IP native.

There’s also been a lot of of work going on to enable MMS, it’s just that they want to do it properly, which takes more time.

For now, if MMS were used here, I’d try to get it working via the Matrix implementation in chatty as described in [0] or via [1].

[0] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_MMS_with_Matrix [1] https://git.sr.ht/~anteater/vgmms

I actually do something similar on the pinephone right now but with xmpp and jmp.chat instead.

Asking from my euro-centric point of view: is there really people still using MMS out there?

The trouble with not having MMS in the US is that it's a "lowest common denominator" type service: not everyone uses it, but everyone expects you to be able to use it. People will be surprised if they send you a photo or group message and you don't see it, and notably, they also can't tell if you were able to see it or not.

You do see it right now, it just shows up as garbage and you stop getting messages after that.

Its the only reliable way (for me) to have group chats with people. Every third party service is platform dependent - everyone must have an iphone, or everyone must be on facebook, etc etc. The only thing that everyone actually has in common is that they all have a phone number.

Plus, several chat services effectively double as SMS clients via their fallback options, which compounds with the fact that RCS implementation here is wildly inconsistent -- especially the moment you factor in iOS.

Yes, there are probably more people globally using matrix but MMS is the defacto messaging app here since it's free if you have a phone (especially since people on iPhones think Apples texting app is MMS.)

Also, like I said: you can already use matrix on Linux.

MMS is the only open, federated, chat system that everybody has access to.

Given that Purism wants to provide a fully open source alternative to the Facebook/Whatsapp walled gardens, I'd say that providing the already existing, open, interoperable chat solution that everybody already has is pretty important.

When Matrix comes to my phone, I gain the ability to message with zero of my normal non-tech friends. When MMS comes to my phone I gain the ability to message with ALL of my normal, non-tech friends -- even those who "don't use" MMS. Why? Because, every phone plane includes MMS.

Yes. All of my friends use MMS.

I realize this is far from the main point of this phone, but wow, that picture quality is...not great at all

It‘s early days and phone cameras are 90 percent software. The PinePhone shows that with decent software even a potatocam can produce okay-ish photos, so I would not judge these early pictures too harshly.

You can already get much better photos by processing RAWs manually; the image in the article shows an automated result obtained from the camera app which at the moment does only very basic processing (like auto white balance based on averaging brighter areas of the photo, which isn't going to be very accurate for some kinds of pictures).

Hmm, so when in August of 2017 I called their ship date of 18 months wildly unrealistic, I guess I was right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15091512

Reply on news.ycombinator.com