and what’s even funnier is that sata ssd drives don’t normally get hot at ALL so it’s just something that stuck to my mind due to the fact that it simply WAS there to be gawk-ed at 
Really, I find the discussion sparked by user1 quite interesting and not negative.
The usual discussion here have been either lead by hyperpositive fanboys or by trolls, complaining that their favorite spy-app wasn’t on the list of promised apps.
It just so happens that I worked both in hardware developement and with high-end RF-equipment, used by real phone companies.
The results are not promising at all. They are highly worrying, just a bit less worrying than they were at the beginning of the year. The hardware is inferior and people lie to themselves by hoping on software improvements. Typical behaviour of software engineers who are used to taking well developed hardware as a matter of fact and thus overestimate what software is capable of.
Against my better judgement I did invest into this project, just to be dragged into a never-ending chain of disappointment, regarding purisms communications. During “developement” they just kept publishing typical marketing stuff and a few crums of insight into software developement. Each and every piece of information on hardware developement was highly worrying. It looked like some amateurs in their garage were developing this. Although admittedly most amateur equipment far outshines what purism presented.
I was flabberghasted as to why on earth they would insist on developing their own crummy os, instead of using an existing, tried and proven one. Why, oh why, do the opensource people insist on forking and forking and forking until each and every neckbeard developer has its own fork so they dont have to compromise with anybody. It would have done so much good to concentrate the effort in an existing mobile OS. But then it suddenly got clear why they wanted that: Why did they never openly say that they were not developing the hardware themselves? Aparantly they outsourced it to some obsure chinese company.
Even though I didn’t see any reasonable probability of this iteration of the project ever producing a fully usable phone, i kept my money really long on purism. Both because it wouldnt hurt me to lose the money and because I was hoping that this project, however crummy it would turn out, might still ignite a new tiny spark in the linux-phone, which has been a rotting corpse being defibrilated for almost a decade.
At the same time I find the arguments of most of the wealthy people in here unbearably arogant. The phone is extremely overpriced and expecting people to pay 900 to 1100 money units for an idea and a barely usable brick of hardware is quite optimistic. But reproaching people who cant afford to blow such considerable sums through the chimney, by reminding them that they dont pay for a phone, but for an idea, is dispicable and literal poison for the project and the community.
Same goes for reproaching people for not being able to grasp the immmensity of this undertaking. It’s not the responsibility of the customer to understand the complexities of a product.
I like to get enthusiastic about stuff like the librem 5 more than the next guy, but people should gain a little bit perspective on the real-life situations of most (non-tech) people, who got duped into investing their hard-earned savings, believing it would be like buying an iphone with less features, but more privacy.
I’m afraid that by the intransparancy, unreliability, overpromissing and underdelivering and thus disappointing, the librem 5 will prove to be a dagger in the heart of the above mentioned corpse of the linux phone idea.
That bein said: cudos to purism for their refund policy. At some point I decided that enough is enough and demanded my money back. And they actually refunded everything quickly and without any problems at all.
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It didn’t feel to me that the hardware would be so expensive, so I set out to disprove you.
Turns out I can’t. I used the schematic of the mainboard to look for the main parts (curse them for not bothering to release a BOM), and guessed the rest. Couldn’t find the emmc, so i picked another random one of mouser and priced it at 22 € in quantities of 1000. The ram seems unbelievably expensive at around 30 € a pop in quantities of 1000. Couldn’t be bothered to search for the wifi module so i guessed it at 20 €. Guessed the LCD at 50 €. Came to a total of around 200 € for all the parts. That’s mouser public prices at low quantities. They probably bought in quantities of at least 10k if not more, so I guess you could knock off another 20 to 50 € off that price. But then again, you’d still have to pay for the batteries and the casing, which should be around that price-range, too. So I guess 200 € as the price for the hardware is a pretty good guess! The radio does come on top of that, though.
The two board design with the fancy connectors and the second cpu make it “unnecessarily” expensive. But really the root to the high price is that they are forced to relinquish socs.
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I wish I could have given more than one heart. Absolutely spot on, although the fan bois won’t like it.
I would personally like to get a refund as well due to the current economic situation but purism has stated they are no longer giving out refunds until the Evergreen batch ships in August (if that actually happens).
no, there is a phone already and dogwood is beeing prepared, altough i suspect as more people get their hands on the phone it’s limitations will become more apparent … but an idea ? what’s wrong with that ? the current market is already asfixiated by the “PERFECT” running proprietary hw and software implementations that most people rely on for the daily grind …
no one reproached anything to anyone. in fact there’s been quite a few recommendations in FAVOR of the PinePhone here …
For what it is, I expect it to be incompatible with practically any software but what I do expect is that the apps specifically made for the phone at least run well and typing actually works properly excluding the browser where they deserve some leeway. Another worry is does it fit in the average pocket? I don’t mind a phone being ugly but I do need to be able to be convienent to carry, hold rotate etc.
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The Librem 5 is not based on Nitrogen8M, though there are common items in the specifications for the two products. I believe early hardware prototyping for the Librem 5 was done using Nitrogen6_MAX development boards, so I can see why there might be some confusion.
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Partly reflects my feeling, too. It’s far better to underpromise and overdeliver. At the point where I “preordered” L5 (ages ago), the official website almost looked like it’s a done deal. I see that the same is true now. Just see the product description:
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
– the phone was MADE with you in mind … (made, really? maybe you wanted to say DESIGNED?)
then all the points where they are talking about the phone as it is existing – yes, I know some people will complain that some (variants) of the phone exist, but sorry, nothing mass-produced and usable enough.
Despite this, I never considered a refund, lets see how this pans out. I invested in openmoko long time ago and was sorely disappointed (due to major hardware flaws). So far, Purism is still rather unique.
In that other grumbling thread (about the missing shipping email), Kyle Ranking gave a decent overview of the issues they face. I wish this was more prominent in their marketing.
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