All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped
puri.sm
puri.sm
I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it at 1% battery, with a notification saying "Your laptop will shut down if you don't plug it in soon". Typically, I'm used to mobile devices using extremely low amounts of power when you're not using them for anything at all.
It's also extremely slow--I figured that it wouldn't be as snappy as a flagship phone but I was surprised to find out that video playback (or, at least, YouTube in Firefox) is basically unusable. That's basically a non-starter for me.
I'm hoping to find something fun to do with it (I don't expect to get refunded, nor do I think anyone else will or should pay $600 for this thing) but haven't come up with anything yet.
Maybe the default settings for Libre 5 are bad? Maybe the software can be improved to improve battery life?
These kinds of problems are often not background processes, but instead parts of the hardware which haven't been powered off or power gated correctly; even a small leak of a few mA could be enough to drain a battery much more quickly than the user would expect.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend the current Linux phones. Years after I got my PinePhone, the experience still pales compared to my old Nokia N900. I wonder if the lack of a physical keyboard discourages hacking. (Yes, a keyboard was released, but you have to order it separately and it has been reviewed as clunky.) Moreover, sometimes I wonder if the tough economy of the last decade has put a lot of idealistic people, who might have hacked FOSS in days of yore, into the precariat and there are just fewer man-hours available for mobile-Linux progress.
> good hibernation settings were released years ago already.
"Good" is very, very relative, especially when it comes to the PinePhone software.
Isn’t there a feature to disable the hibernation timer if tethering is on? That seems like something that could be hacked in just a few lines of code. For my own use, I already found on someone’s Github a systemd service that disables hibernation when the PinePhone is playing audio. (Of course, I agree with you on the last point.)
Also nobody forbids apps from just waking the phone periodically to perform any actions, incl. making a notification.
You can still use whatever bluetooth keyboard you have on hand. I don't think that's a serious issue.
This is with no SIM, just wifi. Kernel is 6.3.0-1-librem5 on PostOS 10 (beryllium). GNOME 3.38.5.
The battery life has been like this since I received it in March 2021.
I generated a bunch of e-waste trying to make Fetch (Linux Phones) happen. Never again. I'll just deal with the ever-more-restrictive-and-creepy duopoly until eventually I'm able to stop using smartphones at all and go back to a dedicated GPS or two, a dedicated music player, and LTE tethering a laptop if I need to look up anything. It'll be inconvenient, but I don't see another usable path out of the creepware spiral.
Nightlies are unstable by definition, btw. It's some autogenerated build nobody normally tests.
<https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/>
You could recoup some of the cost on the second hand market, from a cursory glance, for $400 you could find a buyer fast.
I really wanted to support the ecosystem outside of the existing duopoly but it just feels too unpolished and limited.
Tried figuring out how to setup a development environment but it didn't seem like it was possible on macOS or the instructions were too inaccessible for me to penetrate.
The hardware kill switches are a neat feature but I don't actually have a strong use case for them, and I'm not a big enough enthusiast.
Honestly, I'm wondering if it would be more effective to buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches. If I had a strong desire for a phone with kill switches I'd probably hire someone to mod an existing phone, rather than build one from scratch.
> buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches
Making the connections for the several different kill switches (cellular, wifi, microphone) on a phone whose form factor was not expressly designed for that, would probably result in a rather ugly-looking hack. Moreover, on the PinePhone at least, the cell modem is separate from the wifi chip, so you can kill one while leaving the other on, but I believe that on most phones they are part of the same SoC.
Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.
P.S. For comparison the (somewhat) similarly spec'ed PinePhone costs 150-200 USD.
Much of that cost went into Linux driver/app/phosh development. It made libhandy happen, which become libadwaita. Future Linux-based mobile OSes will be able to stand on the shoulders of all that.
So it’s really more of a donation, plus I got a Linux phone on top of that.
Besides, if I’m lucky and the hardware and battery last long enough, I’ll be using the Librem 5 as a daily driver for a decade, which would help amortize the cost even more. During those years, I won’t have to worry much about software obsolescence. All the drivers have been mainlined into Linux so I’ll always get to use the latest kernel version – even if something happened to Purism.
Still, that did last me a decade; although I replaced it with a PinePhone rather than a Librem ;)
--- First of all, we would like to thank you for your patience and for your support. We do acknowledge that things take longer than we all want and we apologize for any inconvenience.
Sadly, we do not process any refunds at the moment (not just pre-orders), but we do offer two other options which may be ok with you. One is to get the phone which you have pre-ordered (we could ship it within several business days). Another is to receive a store credit +20% gratitude on top of the amount paid.
As I do not have any timeline for the refund all the information I currently have indicates it will not be processed any time soon. I'm very sorry and wish I had a better answer for you. ---
lite phone: https://www.thelightphone.com/shop/products/light-phone-ii-b...
The reviews of this phone that I've seen have been pretty brutal so I've avoided it.
mudita: https://store.mudita.com/store/mudita-pure-minimalist-phone-...
Out of stock, but looked interesting.
Anyone aware of any others?
I met someone in Bellingham with one of these things once. It was pretty sweet, and they'd explicitly cited their having culled their smartphone addiction with it as a selling point, so I guess it works to some degrees. I forget off the top of my head exactly which feature I wish it had that I wanted to sideload on, but whatever.
Battery life is not great but manageable. I bought two spare batteries as backups. I charge the phone at home, and put it into suspend when I’m on the go. Battery life may even improve as software and drivers mature.
Build quality is very decent. Hardware performance is barely enough for web browsing. But you get used to it quickly.
Sad to hear it's not performant at all. Have you looked at Pinephone?
Two ways to trigger it: timed (via Settings) and ad-hoc (via a software button in a separate Mobile Settings app). When suspend is triggered, the screen turns off. (You can tell it’s suspend because the phone cools down considerably after a while.) Calls and SMS will wake it up but other events won’t. Waking up with the side button is instant, but it takes a few seconds until wifi and mobile data come up again.
Could I hook this up to a monitor and actually enjoy using it for web/email/slack?
I don't expect a good experience for using VSCode to develop locally on the device, but perhaps using VSCode via github codespaces or gitpod
my keyboard, mouse, and speakers are connected to my monitor. i connect the phone via a single USB-C cable. suddenly i have full-blown gnome, exactly as i would on a desktop PC or laptop. applications and the launcher return to their normal, desktop layout when using the desktop mode.
it's "just plain old linux with gnome" as long as it's connected to your peripherals, only going into a custom UI when you go mobile. much like the steam deck, but without the clunky "switch to desktop/gaming mode" transition.
the oomph is obviously a little underwhelming but it's enough for lightweight development or (non-video) web browsing.
i haven't had success with calls or text messages (verizon and t-mobile), though. i want to like the librem but i haven't been able to actually use it as a phone.
One day?
Does youtube work? Does zoom work?
Took me a couple of days to get used to that. But now it’s the new normal for me. And that’s after having a snappy iPhone for years.
I agree about Web video: I've dug up some old youtube-dl scripts, updated them to yt-dlp, and now watch videos comfortably in VLC. I used to fetch videos automatically from YouTube's RSS feeds, rather than visiting the Web site "manually"; I haven't resurrected that yet (assuming those feeds are still published?).
Labor is nowhere near the only factor that makes Chinese sources cheaper. It’s the ecosystem. There’s an entire industry that can do every possible thing, and they’re doing it all the time, so they’re flexible and configurable and can quickly spin out a variant on your standard-issue smartphone like it’s nothing.
(Well, assuming Xi’s recent megalomania hasn’t slowly started to destroy all that…)
Mate, forget about chinese wages being livable as an argument.
First and foremost, US/EU workers aren't working in factories which have suicide nets on them, that alone shroud tell you everything.
Secondly, workers in the US have it so good that they don't even want to work in semiconductor factories of TSMC (the better paid kind of skilled factories with weight on your resume), let alone consumer electronic factories where you're a disposable cog, least ones which need suicide nets to keep you from killing yourself after your 12h shift and living in a shipping container village.
Read some actual economic data.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
I have not paid that for my lifetime total of smart phones.
Sure, my phone is out of date and some lesser stats. But for half the performance (which used to be called great performance at one time) I pay 5% the price.
IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.
Having a pine64 style competitor is problematic for Purism since it's cannibalizing their sales. It's likely contributing to the even higher prices needed just to keep the lights on. Which just creates more pressure diverting potential sales towards pine64.
Would Purism even move more product if their prices better matched pine64's? Is there a queue of would-be librem5 buyers waiting that just can't stomach the price? How many people are there really who want a chunky phone with work-in-progress software, regardless of price?
My prediction is after Purism implodes Pine64's prices start climbing.
Mostly, but not only. There's also user support, and PinePhones are much cheaper to build.
I don't think that applies at all to super small high-skill manufacturing runs.
It had it's problems but phone calls and SMS worked reliably.
I ended up going with a 3 year old phone from a different manufacturer that is officially supported but still had to give up the headphone jack.
But this all stopped mattering to me when something accidentally activated a "feature"[0] of TWRP that erased my device and the maintainers have so far been completely hostile to the notion of adding an option to disable that functionality. ADHD now permanently bars me from any form of tweaking because the risk of TWRP suddenly erasing my device one day cannot be mitigated whatsoever. Even making backups from TWRP is off-limits because I'm afraid of it erasing my device instead.
Now I just use my phone because OxygenOS is great, the hardware mute switch is great, lack of camera cutout is great (fuck rounded corners though), and it has some serious flagship specs. Not an advertisement or anything, but this was $300 refurbished from Back Market.
[0]: https://github.com/TeamWin/Team-Win-Recovery-Project/issues/...
I don't feel safe, no amount of discussion about etiquette will make me stop seeing this as a critical vulnerability that needs to be fixed, and it could take days or weeks of work for me to figure out how to compile TWRP properly if I were to fold at this point to the ten people telling me to just do it myself, which is a really stupid (imho) time investment that isn't compatible with my disabilities, sorry.
The devs will be grateful, your problem will be resolved and you'll probably feel better about the whole situation.
What does cost more is final testing, to make sure all the components work together. It is cheaper to do that well at the end of the assembly process before starting packaging, than to deal with a high rate of returns. The testing done throughout the manufacturing process is a significant cost.
By contrast, consider a modern smartphone. There is very little volume to be won by shipping it as parts, and there is greatly increased risk of customer dissatisfaction due to customers-at-large being clumsy, untrained, unequipped and unaccustomed to the assembly task. Just look at how popular it is to complain about assembling Ikea furniture, compare/contrast with e.g. PC assembly, and then scale that up...
But that doesn’t make Purism’s business case any less valid.
A modern smartphone is a tremendous device. In convergent mode many people would not need a laptop or desktop. With replaceable parts and upgradeable open source software it could last a decade. Further, what exactly is a sane digital society without embedded surveillance worth in dollars?
There is no reason why such phones shouldnt have a mass market and more approachable prices. The status quo is a market failure, not a law of nature.
I guess we're discounting Samsung and their Dex engine, then?
Which isn't demonstrated, so you might want to address that...
Oh wait, joke's on me. Google already has 100% of my info and I still paid full price for a Pixel.
If you don't want to spend a lot on a phone, you can do that.
Now I'm much happier. Just much poorer.