Purism is making steady progress on the GNU+Linux powered Librem 5 smartphone.
Highlights:
Previous timelines were an estimate. Shipping is now confirmed for Q3 2019.
It’s official, it’s shipping with the iMX8M Quad. Development issues regarding thermals and power use have been ironed out with the latest development stack.
I just wish I could afford it. If I was paid for the privacy invasions and data stolen from me, I would have no problem paying for it.
Ouch. The Cortex-a53 and M4 are far less than ideal… It’s a five year old architecture that has long since been replaced. I get that you’re paying for the experience and security, but that’s a whole lot of money for something lacking competitive hardware. Even a slight bump to the a57 would have been acceptable. Granted, the a57s are much harder on power consumption.
I’m sure they’d go with something faster if they could do it without binary blobs or proprietary firmware.
The Zeroth goal for this phone is being powered by Free Software. It’s what I’m buying it for.
Eh. There’s more powerful alternatives available as is that would work without proprietary software. I understand though. Pretty cool project. I want to see it succeed, believe me.
I am waiting to see how it plays out. I can’t afford to pay that kind of money for something that might work. But if it works out well I will pick one up.
I totally agree that its aged and that is a hefty price to ask, but i really dont have a whole lot of need when it comes to processing power. I need it to make calls, send texts, a few lo-fi games, and web browsing. With a limited screen size that phones present, I am not truly multitasking, really task switching. Although I am looking brightly at the idea of having a dock and having a true desktop (basic) replacement in my pocket. But its just not there yet anywhere, so in the mean time I worry more about privacy, security, and integration with desktop environment. Open source, and consumer freedom, hell some consumer respect would be nice.
They had to choose the chip as its the only one without the blobs, there was a good interview with the boss man on late night linux podcast.
Great podcast.
to be somewhat honest:
i dont really care for specs or anything. I would like a “phone” and the “smart” part of it somewhat working and leaving anything where it is and not sending everything to somewhere else.
if the cpu is old: I don’t mind as long as it does the job.
But since I have no idea what a “good” phone-cpu is and how you could tell, I wait for reviews but if they are not too bad and/or dont get the whole gnu+/linux sec-phone thats fine.
I dont wanna buy an iphone nor android and i rather get the librem 5 instead of a blackberry.
I just realised that the customs are gonna rape me with import tax when this thing arrives.
Okay I just noticed this, and judging from the video it seems a bit laggy? This is quite a bummer if this will stay like that on release.
I REALLY want them to succeed, but at that price with those specs it might be tough. I get why the price is high, low volume, but one would at least expect it to run good.
The ARM core itself seems to be the same as in raspi3 (A53), so I assume it’s software? is it gnome or what? 
Thankfully the point of this phone is that we can use other software if we wish so.
Super excited about this
If it does not, it’s DOA for me. I will probably try and get one of these phones, but just like all of the other phone before I expect it to fail. Really hope the software works on other phones.
While we’re at it, can we make this sexy again?
We got bigger screens, but worse keyboards that cover from half to 1/3 of said screen .
I don’t mind them being THICC.
I like em from the side 
is it gnome or what?
Both Gnome and KDE are officially supported. Purism’s apps so far have been written in GTK using Rust, but they’ve been working with KDE devs as well.
Formally, they don’t support a desktop, they support an operating system, PureOS. PureOS is basically Debian Testing, so if you can run it on Debian, you can run it on a Librem 5.
PureOS is officially a meme to me now. Arch ARM or bust.
What a coincidence, me too!
