and while i wait i can study the recipe too …
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So I get everyone’s concern and apprehension. It’s been said before but this is a huge task the folks at Purism are doing. It’s not just putting a bunch of pieces together and powering them up. More importantly Purism has to look at this from a marketing standpoint. They are not a big company. They cater to a small PC market. How would it look from a marketing standpoint if they shipped a faulty phone given the phone was crowd sourced? Take their time, get it right, and we will reap the benefits.
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If it is still delayed, the Pinephone may come out at the same time or even earlier with a slightly slower processor (same cores, different clock speed) and a little less RAM (2GB) but for only $150. Also, the modem covers a greater variety of countries.
I would like the Librem 5 specs to be higher, but there is really no way to do better on the CPU side given the constraints and I’m not sure more RAM is useful for anything.
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How did I miss this post!? This is great news, and very much appreciated!
Heh, I can always do with more RAM. 
If you think about how much will be left after the base system is running, 2GB seems quite small to me.
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Interesting, I would like to learn more. Is there any way to stop the device from transmitting all unnecessary metadata? is the absence of metadata another way to track effectively?
If you enable lock-down mode, you should be pretty safe - https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the-librem-5-beyond-hardware-kill-switches/
With wifi and baseband off, nothing will leave the device. And with full lock-down mode, the acclerometer, gps, camera, microphone etc is off as well (as in, no power, really off), so nothing can be stored for transmission later.
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Here’s to hoping for 4GB 
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One of the main points of having an “open” phone is that you can install additional software of your choice and use it on the phone. For that to be viable there has to be a certain amount left after the basic software is running.
Considering that the “high” end Raspberry Pi models have only 1GB and manage to run a usable desktop environment and considering the specs of the various phones that would have run Ubuntu Touch, 2GB is reasonable.
Aren’t set backs supper common amongst crowdfunding?
Can see your point mate, I will also like to know how far we are getting, are we on 50% or 90% done.
Also seeing new laptops and security stick, when I just hope for more man power on the phone.
Will still wait as long as the end of the year, I really want the phone.
My only concern is the librem One bundle. As I read it, that will come with the phone, but now it sounds like I have to pay for calls through matrix
No, man… seriously not. You don’t even have to pay for a Librem One account if all you want is Matrix. That one is for free. The apps are also for free.
On the staff, all I can say is that it grew quite a lot (~50%) during the last ~6 months. The team page was outdated for a long time, but recently updated.
So, it’s not only the tasks that grow 
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I think the original specs said "3GB *
* Specifications are subject to change"
so here’s hoping for at least 3GB.
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Still hoping for 4. 
Cheers!
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My current phone - iPhone 6s - has 2 GB of RAM. So anything more than that will be an upgrade 
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my bb q10 is 2gb ram as well and it never was a problem. i just wanted to avoid the constant nagging of the update notification after bb clearly said they were not investing any more development. so now it’s 50 megabytes of updates waiting to happen that i just can’t verify what they are and i probably don’t care since the phone works the same. probably just my local “big-brother” pushing proprietary crap down my throat. well keep pushing soon the recycle bin awaits …
Some people want to use librem5 as a desktop replacement, with nextcloud, syncthing, mycroft, Wi-Fi Display and so on. See several posts on this forum (even purism advertised it in the sense to replace a desktop - bundled with a screen).
All these applications use some/a lot of RAM. Not to forget the gnome desktop environment, which is heavy on resources…
Just some examples:
fresh loaded gnome (nothing else): 200MB + gsd_*(50MB)
libre-office document with a few pages: 500MB
Wi-Fi Display (if supported): 400MB
and all other apps, daemons, and so on. I don’t know how this should be possible with 2GB.
I think too little RAM and bad video driver (i.e. sluggish and laggy UX) will prevent librem5 from being successful. The first point (RAM) can be solved quite easily. I recently bought 16GB for 80$ high quality ddr4. So 2 GB more should be 10$ max for purism. For the second point (etnaviv driver) I hope they (or anybody else) will get it done.
And in the sense of future-proof: What is the sense of an exchangeable battery if the ram is much too little for future use-cases and can not be upgraded at all?
So, in sum, I hope for 4GB. Four or more. The specs still say “RAM: 3 GB minimum (subject to change)”
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I think the bigger memory limitation is not cost of the ram chips but rather space on the board itself. Also I believe the memory will be soldered on to the board not a DIMM/SODIMM so I don’t think that’s a very fair nor relevant comparison.
As I am not an expert when it comes to board and chip schematics this is all my understanding of second/third hand information; that said…
With a phone form factor chip space is always at a premium, by having a smart card slot and m.2 for the baseband there is an inherent inefficiency of space used for those devices compared to having them directly on the board. This is a plus for repairability and upgradeability bit does mean less space for other chips. I believe so many phones on the market have 3GB of RAM for these exact reasons. I’m curious if the next jump will be to 4GB or 6GB or ??? though I think this will be more based on what Samsung/Hynnix/etc can produce than anything else.
Just something worth considering.
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Isn’t the ram discussion a bit off topic to this thread?
Regarding how much memory, sdcard or whatever is needed from my point of view it would be important to have it exchangeable on some kind of level. There was once a thread with the idea to partner with fairphone which created phones with replaceable components.
I hope that apart from the CPU, which will be on the mainboard I guess, we could maybe exchange components later - maybe even drop the baseband (in case we don’t need it) and use the m2 for other things like a gpu or ssd - ofc depending on the form factor.
I mean this is purism and not apple sticking their components with glue so that you can’t do anything 
Ontopic: Better a late phone than some hardware bugs apart from that I also believe in the Software MVP approach purism has chosen
PS: I am still using my first smartphone the Galaxy S3 which looses against the librem 5 specs in most of the specs
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It’s also worth recognizing that adding new features will add more delays, which is why things are pretty much fixed already within the rough constraints given in the specs.
Even adding more memory comes with risks - and every change has to be tested.
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You’re not looking at this from Purism’s perspective. They need to sell the phone to make money. They have employees to pay. Another delay is a PR nightmare.
If/when Purism releases a second phone we can expect more improvements.
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