It’s just a couple more days untill the birch shipping should start, according to the shipping schedule. Since backers should get an email shortly before shipping starts, this should come sometime between now and a couple of days.
If the birch batch is getting delayed, and keeping in mind aspen wasn’t actually sent to any backer that wasn’t a purism staff member, it seems like the company will just need more time to get things ready, and the current shipping schedule is no longer relevant.
If thats the case, and no one gets their phone in the next iteration of the device, I feel I should appy for a refund. Not that I blame purism for it, but I’m just one of those people that likes to know what to expect 
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Unfortunately, the phone didn’t look to be ready - BT, Camera, etc.
On the other hand, extra wait is paying off, because they are already working on some hardware upgrades - better antenna placement, heat pipes, etc.
Hang in there
It’s clear that this whole shipping announcement was done to meet the deadline. Aspen was supposed to be a proto - prototype, which always have problems right off the assembly line. It would be a disaster to rush them out into consumer hands. So, they are taking time now, to make sure that everything works as intended.
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I would wait for another year if I knew when I’d get it, but the problem is that it was made to look like the phone was already shipping. Then it was left to the backers to find out that they weren’t shipping to backers at all. If you look at a poll done a while ago, it became clear that a large percentage of the backers would actually like to receive the prototype aspen batch. I think that is in part, because statements from purism made it seem that thermal issues had already been worked out, which again, turned out not to be true in the aspen batch, which in turn requires birch to have heatpipes. It’s not something it could do without.
They can take all the time they need, but just be forthcoming about it. Saying one thing and then doing another, which was the case for the first shipments, is inexcusable to me 
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I wouldn’t say they said one thing, and did another (yet). Today was the end of the shipping window. A few things to keep in mind:
- We don’t know how many phones were allocated for Aspen.
- Of those, we don’t know the split of between internal, backers, and other companies (e.g. Halo Privacy)
- We don’t know if there is a review embargo (not uncommon with phones and other consumer electronics)
As @taylor-williamc noted, they seem to be putting this information together. If they say 100 phones went out, I’d understand not seeing any from non-Purism staff. If they say there’s a review embargo, that’ll explain no reviews. If they say they shipped 5k and there’s no embargo, well, I’ll have additional questions.
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Today marks the end of the Aspen shipping batch for the Librem 5 smartphone. We are compiling together details about that
Oh, wow. I expected a blog post tomorrow about the heat pipes in Birch and that Aspen would never be mentioned again. Props if they follow up on this and give details 
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I assume that not a single phone was shipped in the aspen batch (excluding staff members). Still I wish them and all of us good luck.
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I meant they said “shipping” started. But not a single device actually “shipped”. As far as I know the same device that was handed to mr. Lunduke, by Todd Weaver, is the one that ended up for a limited amount of time in the hands of Bryant Gardiner who did an unboxing video, and is the one single device which had any video exposure.
NDA’s are expected with events like this (even though that doesn’t really line with the “openness” that is touted by the company itself).
But I’ve just gotten an update on mastodon about the update so right now I’ll read up on that first.
Good to see that we can expect another update, but the contents of that expected update is kind of the reason I made this post.
Without any tangible promises, that will prove to me at least that more time is required than purism lets on.
Still, I’m hoping for the best.
These are software issues and have nothing to do with the completeness or readiness of the hardware. Software updates are delivered separately and even the very first phone off the line will get everything working.
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You mean it’s very likely they are? Could be. I might have missed it, since I don’t follow the actual developer posts. Todd said “camera doesn’t work”. If he said that it has issues with this and that, one would think it’s a minor problem. There was no follow Q and no details to expand on. Same with the BT - doesn’t work".
Anyway, do you really think that whatever issues showed up off the line, were to be fixed with a patch or 2, purism would halt the shipments for the whole month?
I don’t think so.
Yes, I can only speculate, since I don’t know the numbers produced and all, but decision to Add a heat pipe for the very next batch and change the antenna placement, seems to be something that wasn’t really planned before. That’s more like a design flaw that they found. The fact that Todd’s phone w 3500 mAh needs 2 charges a day is saying a lot. Maybe it’s just OS to be ironed out or maybe it’s that signal is poor bc of antennas or overheating. Or both. Maybe poor signal is the cause of the overheating. Who knows.
The reason they need a heat pipe now is maybe because they expected the chip not to run as hot and they thought they fixed it on Dev Kit. Well, this is a phone now not a kit which comes with new challenges.
Considering how much crap they got with this initial announcement of shipping and inadequate updates , the dumbest move Purism could do is to stop shipping because of a few minor bugs , which wouldn’t bother developers and Linux enthusiasts. It had to be hardware problem as well. To what extent, I don’t know
I mean exactly what I said. All the hardware is there - BT, camera, etc.
Nice attempt at FUD though.
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Of course they are there. Nobody implied otherwise. The point was, how do you know what’s the problem. Unless you know something I missed, as I said earlier
And apparently they still haven’t fully resolved issues with WiFi and BT on the laptops plaguing different iterations. That’s why I can’t take his words lightly.
I think in many cases nobody knows, including Purism. When something does not work, initially you don’t know if the problem is in hardware or software (or both). It takes work, possibly lots of work, to try to find out what goes wrong. Then even more work to figure out why and if/how it can be fixed.
Strictly speaking, you don’t know exactly what the problem was until you are done and have already fixed it and verified your fix. And even then it could still turn out that there are other issues as well, apart from the thing you fixed, that are only seen when you test/use the device in a different way.
Just speculating here of course but perhaps, in some cases when Purism thinks there is a good chance that a given problem it is a software-only issue, they have chosen to say it’s a software issue and keep hoping it’s a software issue until they know otherwise.
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This doesn’t change anything for me. I went into this with my eyes wide open. I voted with my wallet. With regards to Mobile Linux, even if the project fails, Purism already move the ball much closer to the goal post. I bet the folks at pinephone are hoping Purism succeeds, it makes their product viable - well unless they are spending development hours on the OS, which I don’t think is the case.
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Seems like this post is no longer relevant, Birch shipping has been confirmed, and people are receiving their devices. Great news!
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