Librem 5 phone by Purism


Completely agree! I think it would be really neat if Purism and Freephone collaborated on their initiatives and if such work became mainstream. Not just for phones - in India they strip machines down completely to their component parts, whereas in the West we don’t really do anything like that
Yes, all such initiatives should cooperate: OpenMoko, GTA04, Tinkerphones, Neo900, FairPhone, PinePhone, Purism, PiPhone, TyFone, ShiftPhone, ZeroPhone and how they were/are all called...
Unfortunately this never happens because it needs individualist who invest a lot of time and energy and are not appropriately rewarded for the numerous hours they spend while others earn money. Economy of scales is against making such initiatives mainstream against the existing mainstream.
 
Last edited:
Yes, all such initiatives should cooperate: OpenMoko, GTA04, Tinkerphones, Neo900, FairPhone, PinePhone, Purism, PiPhone, TyFone, ShiftPhone, ZeroPhone and how they were/are all called...
Unfortunately this never happens because it needs individualist who invest a lot of time and energy and are not appropriately rewarded for the numerous hours they spend while others earn money. Economy of scales is against making such initiatives mainstream against the existing mainstream.
Is that his Typhone: https://github.com/chfritz/typhone ?
 
λ the β-Redex Reducer is right, that's about it, but if you want to stretch the imagination, you could conjure up future extensions.
For instance the Librem 5 doesn't have FM or LoRa. Maybe one can imagine taking out the modem and plugging in a FM card (with some kind of antena ?), or a modem+FM card, or take out the Wifi card and plug in some LoRa gear, or whatever.
I'm not sure the interface would make it easy (would the software have to send an AT command to dial an FM station ???) and the effort could easily be much more than it is worth however you look at it, but crazy people make crazy things, so who knows...
Looking at docs it seems some interfaces are MDIO or I2S, but I don't know... I guess it would make even less economic sense than technical sense.
Just reading the FAQ, it doesn’t look like a 5G modem would be a possible upgrade for the Evergreen:
“Unfortunately, it won't be possible to upgrade the modem to 5G, because 5G modems consume twice as much energy as LTE modems and require much greater heat dissipation than can provided by a passive heat spreader on an M.2 card that is 30x42mm in size. Plus, 5G in some countries is using new mmWave bands that require different types of antennas. However, LTE will likely remain the cellular standard used in most countries for the next two decades, because 5G is very expensive to implement and will mostly be limited to densely-populated urban centers.”
 
Yes, I remember when 3G modems first came out. You'd switch your phone into 3G mode and battery life would drop from a week to barely more than a day. Thankfully by the time 3G became a bigger deal, they'd got more sensible and barely used any more power than the old 2G stuff. Nowadays, 4G is where 3G was and 5G still uses more power, but cheap 5G phones are starting to come out, and that's generally when power consumption starts to flatten.
 
I’m hoping that does indeed happen, along with reduced thermal output...
 
Indeed. In most ICs the thermal output is almost directly related to the power consumption, and that's largely true of a modem as well, except for the small amount of power put out through the aerial.
 
Production seems to have restarted : I received mine yesterday - I would not have bet on which arrived first between this and the Pyra... Looks like Purism benefited from their higher firepower ! Well, that will give me a bit of food for thought until my Pyra arrives (I thing my order number is roughlty around 1000, more or less)
 
I did not even know that Purism finally ships Librem 5's. Good to hear that it finally ships to real customers, the release was a bit of a mess a few years ago.
 
Well, I was forgotten in the queue it seems. I complained and received my LibreM 5 within a week.


First impression

The package is clean and neat and heightens the expectation while opening it.
The device is heavy, you can hurt someone if you throw the phone at them. Metal all around, which is needed because the device runs lukewarm. (Just 6 hours of operating time). Louis Rossmann would approve of the space for your nail in the corner, which helps open it up (there's no need to open it, but it has the bottom half for a fat battery and the top has all the electronics, which means the battery is not the primary heatsink, as with conventional phones). The clicks it makes when closing are satisfying ASMR.

Usage

You are greeted with many passwords: First only at (re)boot for the LUKS encryption, then for your user each time you unlock the phone. I've not yet found a graphical way to change the LUKS password, so I need to read up on that first (adding a secondary LUKS pwd, test that, then remove the primary one, and hope it keeps booting). The user password is easy to change.
The ecosystem is Gnome. And as a KDE fanboy I struggled finding the right tools that would not import half of KDE into the device.
The autorotate works fine enough. And VLC is capable of not losing frames when playing a 1920x1080 at 24 frames per second, with AAC 44.1 32 bit samplerate. (A highres Music video with lots of movement). Display is excellent. At maximum brightness the white is white (while my other phones are off-white) and the maximum intensity is the same or better.
The keyboard is not that of android, so longholding keys to get alternative characters is not there. There is a console mode, where you get access to F keys, but you lose shift, so you can't do a shift-F1 (afaik), but Control+Alt+F12 is accesible. There is also a limited set of emoji's (I'm pretty sure you can get down to the terminal to create your own groups, but I havent touched that yet)
The OS still needs polishing. It boots at 200% zoom, which makes it all readable, but some applications do not like being squeezed into such a tiny space. Rotating helps, but not always.
It being Linux means you can play something in VLC, and browse while playing it, as it is not really in the background. Android would stop all applications that don't have focus.
I also set up passwordless ssh using an SSH key, so I could send some images and test them. The image viewer (Gnome Image Viewer) crashes every now and then when it detects webp/webm in the directory, even if it ignores the files for displaying. I might have to apt-get install something else.
And Gnome contacts can only import one contact at a time (so the trick was to concat all the files into one VCF file).
Send and receive through bluetooth worked (from/to another phone), you just need to pair them.
The three kill switches are nice (one for GSM, one for Wifi/Bluetooth, one for microphone/audio) Note that every time you enable back the GSM, you have to type in the PIN.

Desktop Mode

Just like the Google Pixel, you can connect the phone to a monitor/mouse/keyboard and enjoy highres. It felt even more useful, as you have all applications you can install using the Debian-ARM repository (similar to Pyra/Pandora). But YMMV, as you don't have native Google software. CPU is ok to work with. But there is no graphics acceleration. So slither.io on the browser crawled to unplayability. But normal webpages scrolled well. Having access to a real Firefox browser (instead of a skin) is quite the luxury. Mouse movement never got stuck, and moving applications from the first screen (phone) to the bigger screen (desktop) is possible after you learn how.

Audio

Audacity shows too much hiss when recording from the build-in mic. However, playback is top-notch. Connecting Bluetooth headphones with microphone is easy and eliminates the hiss (because it's converted to digital before it's being send to the phone). Bluetooth headphone autonomy (how far you can walk from the phone) is identical to my Android phone. Because the CPU is always in high-power mode, there is no interruptions in the audio, like you get when the Android phone is in low power and it decides to to a background task.


Backlight

The backlight is yellow, not the ugly blue you get on most phones now. And you can modify the intensity of it, which my Android does not have (it's just on/off, thre is no dimming)

Camera

Ugh, a weak point on the phone is the camera. And it's due to the software (It is unfinished, and it warns us about it, so its a known issue). The camera produces 13.3MB DNG files, which are then converted to a 400KB to 1.4MB JPG files, which is what you get to see. Autofocus is not controllable in the GUI yet, and the guessing by the camera application is sub-par. As you understand, this Fairly low resolution and I have some dead pixels in the sensor to boot. It's... functional, but don't expect good pics. (See the IMG*.jpg ; you can crank contrast up, and see for yourself that the darkness contains much more information than needed - maybe a good thing in the DNG, not in the jpg)


Conclusions:

+ Powerfull Linux programs (requires Linux knowledge to make use off)
+ Good Audio
- Too low resolution to display most windowed programs (can be mitigated by zooming back to 100%)
- Low battery life (like... dude, this is the total opposite of a Nokia)
 

Attachments

  • small_withPandora_for_size.jpg
    small_withPandora_for_size.jpg
    54.6 KB · Views: 3
  • small_serviceable.jpg
    small_serviceable.jpg
    41.9 KB · Views: 3
  • small_package.jpg
    small_package.jpg
    38.2 KB · Views: 3
  • small_good_audio.jpg
    small_good_audio.jpg
    37.3 KB · Views: 5
  • small_computermode.jpg
    small_computermode.jpg
    45.4 KB · Views: 4
  • screen_highres.jpg
    screen_highres.jpg
    871.1 KB · Views: 3
  • IMG20250131020049.jpg
    IMG20250131020049.jpg
    378.1 KB · Views: 5
Last edited:
Back
Top