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Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

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Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#121

Post by als0 »

floatboth wrote: post #101
novaRom wrote: post #92

I like they use main processing unit from a Dutch company; is its ROM open source or/and can be accessed? All ARM-based Sytem-on-Chips do have a proprietary ROM, which is used mainly for boot-up and multicore management. But there's no access to check if it may do something else. >> The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware this is another vulnerability

The immutable ROM that finds firmware and jumps to it is indeed usually proprietary, but since it's tiny and immutable, it's considered "part of hardware" and is okay even for the FSF "Respects your Freedom" certification. The one mutable/loadable blob the i.MX8 requires is firmware for the DDR4 PHY (not training code you run on the CPU, but something that runs on the PHY apparently??) and they're using an embedded t…

> (IMO, that's a silly requirement from the FSF, I think keeping the main CPU free of blobs that it doesn't run i.e. blobs for other things does not have any meaningful benefits)

Depends on how privileged the peripheral or subsystem is. And what data it is trusted with.

If it can't harm the main CPU and is properly confined then it's fine in my book.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#122

Post by TylerE »

ThreeFx wrote: post #48
camjohnson26 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want good software you simply have to pay more. These are small teams with no prior experience trying to do something huge, it makes sense to expect to pay even 5 times more if the direction of the project is good. Hopefully future versions will be cheaper as they learn and gain experience.

That was my motivation as well when I prepurchased the phone. Even though you might not get a $600 phone, Purism and the entire Linux community gain a lot of experience about the difficulties of designing hand-held hardware, applications and operating systems. In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.

It isn't close to a $600 phone. The $180 Nokia 4.1 has near identical specs....except it has an 8 core, 2ghz CPU and not a 4 core, 1.5ghz cpu

You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#123

Post by leetbulb »

zecken wrote: post #88
leetbulb wrote: post #67

Would be nice if it had a hardware kill switch for other sensors (especially MEMS-based) such as accelerometer: Edit: It does. Nice. https://crypto.stanford.edu/gyrophone/files/gyromic.pdf https://www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/mems-acce... https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/papers/general/traynor-cc...

It says in this post that the IMU is killed when all 3 other skill switches are off

Wow, I totally skipped over that. Wasn't familiar enough with the acronym. Very nice.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#124

Post by INTPenis »

I just found out they didn't use AOSP. Ok so it's based on Linux but isn't anyone worried that they're re-inventing some wheels by not using AOSP? Or is there a licensing issue I'm not aware of?

Edit: Sorry but my cynicism stems from backing a lot of open source attempts, including N900 with Maemo, ZTE Blade and Jolla. I ended up giving away two of those and the last is rotting in storage.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#125

Post by rchaud »

Animats wrote: post #99

early bird discounted price of $649 And people used to say iPhones were overpriced.

The response to that has always been, people will pay the Apple premium because to them it's worth it, for the camera, for iMessage, for ease of use, etc.

Why can't the same principle apply here, but with respect to user-toggle-able hardware switches and replaceable batteries?

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#126

Post by Rooster61 »

One thing that isn't clear to me. The phone clearly supports GPS in terms of hardware, but does it actually do anything with it? It won't have access to Google or Apple navigation, and that is certainly something I use my current phone's GPS for.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#127

Post by bennofs »

Rooster61 wrote: post #126

One thing that isn't clear to me. The phone clearly supports GPS in terms of hardware, but does it actually do anything with it? It won't have access to Google or Apple navigation, and that is certainly something I use my current phone's GPS for.

You can use Google maps navigation via a web browser

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#128

Post by seba_dos1 »

Rooster61 wrote: post #126

One thing that isn't clear to me. The phone clearly supports GPS in terms of hardware, but does it actually do anything with it? It won't have access to Google or Apple navigation, and that is certainly something I use my current phone's GPS for.

PureMaps, Navit, GNOME Maps, Marble, TangoGPS, various OSM web UIs...

There's plenty of GNU/Linux apps, some of them providing online and offline turn-by-turn navigation, and some of them even already working well on mobile form factors.

The software will surely need some time in order to get polished enough to be used by a total newbie out-of-the-box, but it's not like there's no software for that at all.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#129

Post by lvl4x »

rchaud wrote: post #118
jraph wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an environmental perspective, it makes sense to keep your current phone as long as possible. I'd love to get rid of this thing full of proprietary stuff though.

Hard to do when Apple intentionally slows down the phone with new firmware updates and Android OEMs abandon replaceable batteries for a soldered on unit whose ability to hold a charge drops off precipitously after 2 years.

I've never seen a cellphone with a soldered battery, and most of the slowdown in iPhones is caused by the OS slowing down to make up for reduced battery capacity. With apple and other manufacturers having to replace batteries in their own phones, I seriously doubt we'll ever see soldered batteries.

Re: Librem 5 Smartphone Final Specs

#130

Post by ptx »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #90

This phone has a higher screen resolution than my laptop. It also has almost as much memory, but I guess that's a prerequisite for running Gnome. Why didn't they go for Xmonad?

They replaced GNOME's shell/window manager/compositor with their own (phosh/phoc).
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