Purism Librem Phone
 

Here was discussion about building our own device but according discussion looks like it would be too hard and too expensive.

Purism is going to create their own mobile device! :)

https://puri.sm/surveys/librem-phone...minary-survey/

There is survey where you can tell what hardware and specifications you'd like to see in a phone.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Well, you can't even ask for a screen resolution below 4,5 inch. Next. (And why is 512MB RAM even an option? They're going to preload it with some Android-based thing anyway so it wouldn't be able to use a single application.)

On a side-note, which market does Purism target, exactly? Their stuff costs SO MUCH MONEY you have to be rather affluent to be able to afford them on a whim. Ethics are great and all, but if your only possible customers are super rich kids, is there any purpose to your product except bragging rights? It's high time these companies trying to show not only Apple can make far too expensive luxury products get a clue and see that things can be good without being expensive. The luxury market is already lost on people who can afford to live luxury lifestyles, and surprise surprise, those people could not care less about ethical products.

Edit: missed this tidbit: "Do you require a mobile connection outside wifi?" What? Why would anyone buy a phone of €1000 if you can't even use it as a phone? What were they thinking?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Well, just vote that you need more than just wifi.

And for the price, well if you just produce small amounts usually the customer have to pay more, because you can't spread the fix costs on 100000 units. And of course it costs more money to have a free and open device, because you don't pay with your personal data and the manufacturer don't get money for advertising other products ...

:confused:

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yeps, and if you read it carefully it does indeed provide the reasoning behind this; as the current phone devices have closed-source baseband processing it is impossible to adhere to the free ideals that the device tries to achieve.

It does state though, that they will try to pursue open alternative for the baseband which is a fairly difficult goal IMHO.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Did you miss the bit where they said 'Not Android'??

So the question remains, if not android, then what? Ubuntu?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I just asked the guys in #purism about this, and they claim it will run their PureOS with some kind of Gnome UI...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

We all know the mantra. We have heard it a gazillion times and it is getting old.

The companies should realize this. In this equation,

profit = retail price - production cost

it is not the "production cost" part that is fixed. It is the "retail price" part. You need to start from that and then see how you can squeeze the production cost such that profit will be a positive number. If you work out you cannot do that, then don't even start. Do not attempt to cheat by increasing the retail price! It won't work.

Again, we have heard that many times too. Then find your way around that or call things what they are:

A phone without a phone? Hmm...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That sounds at least interesting, but with just Wifi it's pretty useless for me. Everywhere, where I have Wifi im not bound to a small form factor and can use my Laptop. Probably other people have other use cases. But that's what applies to me.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

It's old but true. That's the way things work. And the problem aren't the production costs, but the development costs.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Probably.

I am generalizing and including development costs in the production costs. You produce N units at a total cost of X. That X comprises development cost Y and production cost Z. Y is more or less fixed, in a sense that it does not change with the number of units produced. Z does. The rest is simple arithmetics.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Read the Purism survey. They ask if users want phone card & WiFi or WiFi only.

Purism is trying to make a open smartphone like many here wanted in the last years, but I see a lot of negativity in TMO.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Probably self protection / scepticism due to so many similar failed projects in the past.

I filled in the survey and added that a hw keyboard is mandatory for me to buy one to the comments. Pretty sure that is not going to happen.

Still wish them well and hope the project succeeds.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

If you look at my first post in this thread, you can see, that I've read that already. And there you can also read, that I'm not negative.

I have already filled in the form, but as I have written here I have of course ticked, that I need more than just wifi.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

An important thing: the drivers!

Are they going to use Android drivers via libhybris or native drivers? Both options have their pros & cons.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I suspect they've chosen that freescale chip due to available FOSS drivers.

Bringing out a hybris based device seems a bit silly at this point for them, given their target audience.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

OMG Ubuntu has a rumor about after a "Phone Campaign Temporary Page“ appeared:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/p...os-speculation
ref:
The post that (briefly) slid into RSS feeds linked to suitably vague URL @ puri.sm/posts/phone-campaign-temporary-page.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I really want a project like this phone to succeed, but the hardware will be difficult enough without trying to make an operating system too. Making a GNU/Linux system for a phone seems conceptually easy enough, but in practice it's really hard. If they're serious they will use Sailfish, at least to start with, otherwise I fear this will just end up on the pile of failed Linux phones.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

SailfishOS isn't free enough for them, so I doubt they will choose that.

Plasma Mobile is close enough to a Sailfish stack anyway but with a free UI, so perhaps that's what they will package into their own distro.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

As much as KDE rankles, (old kde 3.5 victim here)
their Plasma is undeniably beautiful
and they (very grudgingly) do tend to have everything 'open'

They, of all people aside from Maemo, can do this.

heck,
if they just built the hardware
and opened it up to development inside TMO...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

This sounds really awesome. Hope they succeed.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yes, and the main difficulty will be the OS. See the time spent by Jolla developing Sailfish.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Lots of nice ideas. Is that a 16/10 screen? I like it too. The software compatibility is of course a great pro for this phone, with full-fledged distributions, and I particularly like the comparison table with iOS and Android. :D They seem to take inspiration from the Neo900 with the hardware kill switches.

However the delivery date is far in everyone's mind, I'm afraid this will impair the funding and reduce the number of backers (although it's understandable that they need time). Hope they will succeed as well.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Any info on mobile profile of PureOS ?
https://pureos.net/

https://liliputing.com/2017/08/puris...sell-599.html#

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Of course. It is much different, though. They will use the regular Linux kernel and GNU software stack. It would be a VERY significant and important achievement if they succeeded. It would be a major breakthrough if normal Linux distributions could run on phone hardware. It could be compared to the openness of Raspberry Pie. Sailfish has come far, but not nearly enough. They are still 100% dependent on Android kernel and device drivers.

<rant>The Android kernel and software stack is a nasty fork in the free software world of Linux that hardly gives anything back. Think about it. As soon as hardware vendors create drivers (that are only compatible with Android) for new devices they forget about it and begin creating the next new device. No drivers and hardly any software is upstreamed. People are tinkering with Android devices and flashing "rooted" images and think that they achieve something with that. Nothing. No sharing, no upstreaming, no caring for the wider software community. All in vain and wasted time. It is a shame and disgrace in the light of the Linux kernel history and achievements of Linux desktop distribution software. Probably why many phone makers hardly dare to mention that they are using the Linux kernel. I guess they are ashamed.</rant>

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

untrue.

SFOS has no dependencies to Android and can run well on any HW that you can get Mer running on. Think about it a while; there are SFOS implementations running on non-android devices, for example RaspberryPI and N9(50)
Also the original Jolla sbj1 was first planned to run on NovaThor SoC requiring no android-funny-business and only had to be changed when STE pulled the plug on the chipset...

The reason most SFOS ports rely on libhybris is because that's all that is available for most phone hardware.
If some vendor made a non-android device platform it'd be no-brainer to port SFOS for it. Without a trace of android. :D

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That crowdfunding campaign reeks of amateur marketing techniques that backfire on themselves, it doesn't give readers the confidence that Purism can deliver on their promises, and therefore I don't believe they are going to achieve their goal.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I agree, mostly what I meant too. Device drivers is the big problem. But the fact is that 100% of Jolla devices so far run Android kernel and libhybris. Even the tablet that is Intel x86 hardware (I have a Jolla tablet, too)! Once drivers are overcome, any FLOSS distro could run on the device. For sure GUI applications need some tweaking for phone use and touch interface. Sailfish is also partly closed source at GUI level.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

According to their latest information :
- nope, no closed-source binary drivers.
- 100% opensource drivers.

So neither the android drivers+libhybris, nor the manufacturer's native driver (if such exist - most ARM chipset manufecturer only provider android), but vanilla upstream linux kernel and upstream Gallium3D.

That's why they are currently working with Freescale i.MX 6, and considering eventually the i.MX 8 :
apparently the i.MX 6's GPU is well supported by the etna_viv driver.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yes but your post made it sound like that'd be Jolla's fault and it bloody isn't; it is totally out of their hands, you just cannot get a mobile reference platform without android because such things don't exist!


Yes but how are you going to achieve that, which mobile vendor is large enough that it has any leverage to force a SoC vendor to opensource it's drivers?? And if such a company existed, what could it gain from it, why would it do so??

It's just not going to happen, period.


The parts that are closed in SFOS don't matter as long as Jolla allows use of the relevent libraries, just like it does for community ports currently.
And if you cannot live with that there is always Nemo; when not as polished as SFOS it does the job.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Perhaps MER is?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That is exactly what this Purism project is trying to achieve.

And you are wrong, there are opensource drivers for many chipsets. Quite a few Qualcomm and Allwinner SoCs have mainline linux support (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=99357). It is just that most drivers are made for the Android kernel and Android stack. It is hard to port them to the vanilla kernel and GNU stack.

I'm convinced we are going to get a phone one day that can boot the vanilla kernel.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That's a no-brainer, I can boot a mainline kernel on just about anything.
For it to be useful beyond having anything else as serial terminal for I/O; well, that's another thing alltogether...

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Sure, but they have no reason to choose mer over the PureOS distribution that they already maintain

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

That says right on the page in their FAQ:

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Just stumbled upon it via phoronix. [1]
Some months ago I took a look at Librem's x86 PureOS (not to be confused with PureOS [2] ;) ) which they ship with their laptops.
It seemed to me like one of those many largely pointless "yet another Debian spin" distributions, that simply take vanilla Debian, add their own artwork repo and call it a new distro.

While I usually don't like that approach, in this case however I'd call that a big plus if they go the same route for their mobile OS, because it would mean that even vanilla Debian should run on it.
This in turn would eliminate the one big flaw of Maemo: dependency of the user on the device manufacturer

From a SW POV this looks nice. I'm a little concerned about the HW design though. Librem has a tendency of mimicing the Apple design. So I'd expect a non-replaceable battery, which would just shift the point of planned obsolescence from SW to HW.


[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...purism-phone-5
[2] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pureos

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

So, will this be able to replace the Neo900?
Actually... What happened to the Neo900?

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

According to their website, that should not be a problem:

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I must say I like the idea of this phone. I'm seriously interested in investing in it, but I also invested in the Jolla Tablet. We all know how that went.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Lunduke show interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SwE9W8JasA

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

I really need to find a way to express more clearly what I consider a "replaceable battery".

I mean a battery that I can swap out "on the road" without any tools.
Like with the N900: pry off back cover, take out old battery, insert new one, reattach cover
Or with my old laptop: unlock lock switch, hold back spring switch, take out battery, snap in new battery, lock lock switch

I can't do that with any of the Librem laptops (or a lot of "modern" laptops for that matter). I need at least a screw driver for that which in turn means I wouldn't want to do that in a crowded rocking train where I'd lose half of the screws in the process.
That's what I'm afraid of will also be the case for the Librem 5.

Re: Purism Librem Phone
 

Yeah nobody is making things like this anymore, and with good reason too. Most people don't bother buying secondary batteries for things, and so the benefits of having them quickly replaced is lost on them.

It's cheaper, more secure, and easier to seal against the environment to keep the battery internal, and so long as the thing isn't epoxied into the frame then that's good enough for me to replace it when it gets a bit old.