Yeah… BTW, I’m not using the L5 as my main phone, so I haven’t tested with actual other humans. 
I think the latest audio update might have attenuated the ambient capture a bit, or at least that’s my impression. Sounds more “normal” now, mobile-phone-normal, I mean.
But nice and clear.
be careful ! don’t overdo it ! two phones so close to your head at the same time is probably something you don’t want to prolong even if you have unlimited voice calls in your cell-network … better safe than sorry
I’m hoping it cancels out any 5G carcinogens wafting through the air down my street. 
have you done the same experiment using connected headphones ? try keeping the phones as far away in relation to each other as possible and see if the echo is still as severe … maybe try NOT touching the phones while you’re at it.
No, I haven’t tried that yet, but good idea.
I wonder if other owners here have the same impression as I do about the new level of clarity…?
It would be necessary to specify a package and version so that an owner could know whether the update is installed i.e. whether we are all testing the same thing. I’m not just being difficult because I see on my phone, the following output:
The following packages have been kept back:
librem5-gnome-phone
I also note that, as far as I can tell, updating from the PureOS Store (GUI) has never worked. I always have to apply updates from the shell (which I don’t mind doing because I do that already with all my other Linux computers, but it’s not very user-friendly i.e. not very mainstream).
Are you seeing either of these issues?
Nope. GUI updates work just fine for my L5. Where do you see the “kept back” message?
Presumably all L5 users get the same updates at approximately the same time and most apply them reasonably soon thereafter, with a few exceptions.
The message is output from sudo apt upgrade
The message is not unique to PureOS or unique to the Librem 5. I’ve seen it on other distros and computers.
That’s interesting. I haven’t seen that, in recent memory. Certainly not on the L5. I update the system both ways, GUI, or terminal, depending on my mood.
You’ve just tinkered too much! 
Do you notice a difference in call quality now compared to, say, 2 days ago or more?
I didn’t think that I had tinkered that much. I haven’t changed the default repos and I really haven’t installed very many packages.
The GUI often says:
Requires Restart
with a button saying
Restart & Update
but pressing the button doesn’t seem to do anything. I can manually restart of course and that seems to clear the problem. After manual restart the GUI says “Software is up to date”.
It’s all a bit confusing but I understand that in the early days there are going to be plenty of rough edges like these.
I will keep an ear out for any audio quality changes and may comment some days hence. I’ve never had a problem with audio quality and all my testing has been with actual other human beings and mostly just real calls, which does mean that the test environment is not well controlled.
You have to double-tap to restart and update. I believe I saw an issue tracker about that a while back.
Yeah, audio quality was pretty good for me after I figured out the microphone settings could be adjusted for improvement…something I don’t normally have to do with an Android. But after I saw the call audio updates come through (yesterday, I think), I figured I would check again, and it did seem to have been perfected. Just anecdotal, of course.
Did you try sudo apt full-upgrade?
No, but I’ll try the “double tap” next time there is an update available and see whether that is my foolish error. 
Same here (Pinephone/Mobian/Phosh). I think it’s an artifact of the “Software” app more than anything else. I use the terminal for updates because there is better feedback. Mobian has been averaging about a dozen updates a day.
Call audio has been pretty good, but not great. The thing that really bugs me is that when I listen to podcasts via Bluetooth in the car, the sound configuration switches to phone call, but the input/output device also switches to internal mic/speaker instead staying on Bluetooth when a call comes in. Very annoying! Does it also do that on the L5?
As I understand it, that “have been kept back” problem, which for me seems to happen from time to time on various debian-based systems, means that dependencies have recently changed so that the package now depends on some other package that is not (yet) installed. When you do “apt update” the default behavior of apt is to only update things, not to install anything new. So when a new dependency has been added, we can sometimes end up in this annoying “kept back” situation. To get rid of it, in my experience it usually works to simply do apt install for the package in question, which should work because “apt install” installs the requested package including any dependencies. So in this case the following should work if librem5-gnome-phone has been “kept back”:
sudo apt install librem5-gnome-phone
Does that help?
New dependency normally is automatically installed, kept back means dependency is unresolved, which could be due to
updates instead of main)Does it work eventually if you keep pressing the button several times?
I had that problem but in my case it seemed to work if pressing the button a second time. See:
But would any of the reasons you listed explain why the “kept back” issue could be fixed by simply doing “apt install” for the package? I know that has worked for me several times.
Oh, I hadn’t seen that bug report. I’ll check again, but as I recall it sometimes failed on more than one press.