Took 3 years to get mine. I didn't sign up for call service and can't comment on call quality. They push updates regularly and the quality consistently improves. It could hardly take a picture when I got it. Now, it takes a decent photo. As others have commented, the product is ideologically driven. That's the main buy-in for me—I'd like to see more free software in consumer products. At the very least, it's an expensive and fun pocket computer. Maybe its vision reaches full fruition. Maybe it helps the next attempt to open up mobile.
Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#12I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product. The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
I see what you're saying. I guess I expect these sorts of things to suck.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#13I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product. The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
> I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
This is not at all consistent with my N9 experience.
But it was a disappointment in terms of not delivering source for a reproducible FOSS firmware a community could form around and iteratively improve, nor did they facilitate easily replacing the OS/distro.
If the N9 had the pinephone'seasily replaced 100% FOSS firmware via SD cards and community, we'd be in a very different place today.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
> I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed. This is not at all consistent with my N9 experience. But it was a disappointment in terms of not delivering source for a reproducible FOSS firmware a community could form around and iteratively improve, nor did they facilitate easily replac…
I believe most of the source was available but maybe some stuff was missing. Same with the N900 which was also nearly unusable. I frankly liked the Blackberry style Nokias better (E63 etc.) and source for those would have been great.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#15Coming up on a year with my Librem 5 USA. So much has changed. I started with no video. You had to manually adjust the camera for pictures. Maps app was opening with only the upper left corner of the application viewable on screen. Heck, the gps would place me just off of Ivory Coast(from USA). Pictures sent by text had to be opened in the file browser. No suspend feature had you scrambling for a plug after 2-3 hours use. Well, Video is here(barely), auto adjusting settings for pictures is here. Open maps works and gps gets me within 15 miles. Pictures render in text threads. Auto suspend is here. So many other things have come a long way in just -Sent from my Librem
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#16Summary: With apologies for the delay, we are now preparing your Librem 5 to ship and need you to read this email carefully with replying until May 01, 2023. i ordered mine on 14.10.2019
It kind of gives the vibe of a kickstarter project that didn't implode, but instead... eventually got their product out the door and shipping to people.
I wonder what the people who run the company would do differently, a 2nd time around? That's if they'd be up for doing it again.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#17Summary: With apologies for the delay, we are now preparing your Librem 5 to ship and need you to read this email carefully with replying until May 01, 2023. i ordered mine on 14.10.2019
It kind of gives the vibe of a kickstarter project that didn't implode, but instead... eventually got their product out the door and shipping to people. I wonder what the people who run the company would do differently, a 2nd time around? That's if they'd be up for doing it again.
This interview with the former CTO was interesting, relevant quote:
> Entire group was on board with this (which was "no, we are not ready"), except Todd who just said that we are doing it in a month and we are starting one way or another that phone campaign.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#18I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product. The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
> the [N9] or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
Maybe you should have paid full price... ;) I believe the one you got had some defect.
I used a N9 (daily driver) for about 10 years (until I got a L5, actually...), and it wasn't especially slow (OK, the storage was slow for writes). Things started getting worse and worse due to the lack of SW updates (so no support for newer TLS versions for instance), but that is another story.
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#19Summary: With apologies for the delay, we are now preparing your Librem 5 to ship and need you to read this email carefully with replying until May 01, 2023. i ordered mine on 14.10.2019
It kind of gives the vibe of a kickstarter project that didn't implode, but instead... eventually got their product out the door and shipping to people. I wonder what the people who run the company would do differently, a 2nd time around? That's if they'd be up for doing it again.
it really feels like, they should have been given just pure venture capital and a lot more time and test hardware in small batches. And then with enough knowledge pick real good hardware and then deliver a kick ass linux phone. The processor is about 6 years old, a lot will not be working at this time, i still support the idea of a linux phone, i really hope it gets better in the next few years. this android, ios duopoly really sucks ass
Re: Librem 5 availability lead time quietly reduced from 52 to 20 weeks
#20I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product. The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
My N9 wasn't by any means slow, and to this day is my favorite phone.
I pulled it out last year and tossed my SIM in it for a month. It worked fine, though the battery is a bit weak.