What is the current state of the battery life on the Liberty Phone ? Can it give 12 hours between charges if my needs are XMPP, web browsing, Tuba, and emaIl ?
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There are no physical battery differences between Evergreen-based models:
Note that BOM differences can and do affect the battery life in this case - Liberty Phone has 1GB RAM more, which comes at a cost of needing more power to maintain its state.
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@Dlonk in case you want to do it, keep in mind to use the same battery for such a test, otherwise it’s not clear if battery or L5 USA is the cause for different uptime. And the test should be made without suspend, since the test is about RAM energy consumption.
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I can’t comment on the Liberty phone but the standard L5 isn’t going to give you 12 hours unless its sleeping. When sleeping you won’t get your XMPP, Tuba, or email notifications. I think you will get about 5 hours. If you are OK with it sleeping you’ll do pretty well. I think you could get your 12 hours.
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Doesn’t help to compare the RAM energy consumption of both devices. That can only do someone who owns both. And a sleeping device can reach up to 18h+ (also depends on battery age and usage).
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It absolutely is - 12 hours is exactly what you get without sleeping, but it has to be idling all the time 
It lasts about 4 hours of active usage, and up to about 20 hours when sleeping all the time with modem on.
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I’ve been using Liberty Phone as my phone since I received it. I don’t use the suspend feature, in case I want alarms. Each morning my Liberty Phone wakes me up for work.
My battery was charged fully probably about six hours ago, although I don’t keep much track. At the time I removed it from the charger, I used the camera to take some pictures then plopped the device aside on a table; idle but with the camera enabled and probably the wifi, but modem disabled because modem is a large power draw (and I can access texting or calling via some browser app for my provider anyway). About 30-40 minutes later, I woke the screen, opened Firefox, opened the Slack website to check some messages, then when Slack took too long to load I turned off the screen and left the device at home when I went on a short excursion to a nearby church to pick green beans in the church garden. Upon returning home, I picked up the phone on the table and scrolled Slack on Firefox for a few, then closed Firefox and turned off the screen and left the device on a table. I went outside to help with the cabbage and then the dog wanted to play the game where we kick the old cans, so she and I kicked the old cans until she became tired in the heat and took a break to chew on a rotten fruit she had found.
While the dog chewed the rotten fruit I went back inside to play with my technology toys. But rather than to use my Librem 5, I sat down at the docked Librem 14 with the big 4k monitor and System76 keyboard to do some compute. After some time, about two hours ago, I went and sat on the couch. I sat for a time and stared into space and chatted with the other humans, who have the couch screens that are always singing on the WiFi, calling out to each other and telling the other humans what to think. Today’s topic was the supposed failed recent assassination of a former government leader. After being shot in the head, the leader took two fingers like one of those braveheart warrior movies and drew two lines on his face with his own blood and cheered for the crowd. We heard about it yesterday but absent a screen of my own I went and grabbed my phone, still idle on a nearby buffet. I woke it up so I too could read the news or watch supposed news videos, and chat. I watched a video of a man explaining how he pointed out the shooter to police while the shooter was climbing up to his vantage point to attempt the assassination, but the police didn’t do anything.
In part I was procrastinating. Away and on the L14 docked like a desktop, I had been attempting to recall the password to my other new toy mini computer. As I lost interest in news, I opened the terminal on my phone and guessed passwords again for quite some time via ssh. Obviously my serious computers use ssh keys, but this one was a toy. After stubbornly remembering my password and feeling relieved, I got on these Purism forums to de-stress as a way to social media. In part I was again procrastinating. And here I saw these folks who @'ed me, and wrote this reply, interrupting myself partway through to brush my teeth. While typing for the last 30 minutes, battery has fallen from roughly 41% to 31% or so. You could extrapolate that with some quick math and predict you might get 300 minutes, or 5 hours at best, while constantly typing. Of course, in reality, we hardly ever charge above 95% and hardly expect the device to stay up below 10%.
In my use case, none of this bothers me. I have what might be the best phone battery life extension technology in the world. The back comes off the Librem 5, and I can insert a new battery that is fully charged. I have 4 batteries total and 3 external chargers for this purpose, although two of the chargers broke so now I use a spare Librem 5 for a charger, which is a waste of resources. I can even swap the battery out and back in without turning off my phone if an outlet is available to plug the phone into the wall during the blip with no battery. If I go on a long trip, I can bring the 4 batteries with me at full charge. If we power off the device while not in use, these can last a long time. I once visited a cabin with no electricity for 4 days and only used 2 Librem 5 batteries up out of four, because I usually powered off the phone during the vacation and spent the hours living my life instead. I was able to develop and publish an HTML guide (made in a text editor and from the Liberty Phone’s camera) for how to reach the obscure cabin, beamed up to my server via my Liberty Phone modem.
But I have not been using my phone for GPS. Earlier I said battery was at 31% but while sitting and typing this, now it’s down to 27%. Time for a swap. Now it’s at 83% instantly.
I don’t much charge my phone anymore. Instead, I swap. I often swap once around midday, and once before sleep (for lasting through the night to be my alarm).
Maybe my anecdotal testimony will give you insight. To be fair, until this paragraph I was trying out typing in landscape instead of portrait and notably it seemed to take me a lot longer to type that way. Feels like I was typing this post for 45 minutes.
So if you want personal anecdote or testimony from a user, now you have it, but the information from @dos is short and to the point and might be just as good.
Obviously I’m more careful about how I use my energy than an Android user would be for a phone at this same price, but my phone is essentially immortal because of replaceable batteries, and for me personally it’s worth the tradeoff because now I have tcpdump and easy off switches instead of any hokus pokus or “maybes”/speculation surrounding whether a phone calls home.
If you are researching battery stuff to consider buying a Liberty Phone, I ought to warn you of a possibly more concerning issue: I don’t know what the shipping times are on these, but it might be long. I ordered my Liberty Phone on August 13, 2023. It shipped on September 25, 2023, slightly over a month later. In hindsight, that’s a good shipping time. I ordered another one to be a backup on February 20, 2024 - but that one never shipped. I asked in the support emails if they thought it would ship by October because I might have a vacation later this year, but I was told they cannot promise that. So, we are coming up on the 5 month anniversary of that order quite soon. I don’t have any reasons or insight/information regarding why those two lengths of time are so different. Maybe it was because the backup order included peripherals like a USB-C, and Purism hasn’t the time or energy to actually acquire those this summer because of some financial pressures or something, so they ignore the order. I have literally no idea. Maybe the difference is because I admitted in an email to support that this order is to be my backup and Purism should prioritize other customers above me, and their stress is so great that they heard me say that and ran with it.
I think in March they said a shipping ETA would be April, but in April they said there were no ETAs anymore. So, likewise if you ordered a Liberty Phone today, I have absolutely no idea what the ETA would be. If I will not receive mine until November, when would you receive yours? I have no idea.
But not receiving your device for half a year might hit you more than questions about battery life. In my case, it doesn’t and I sort of don’t care, because I am using my Liberty Phone every day and I know I will eventually receive the backup device. But these are matters you may wish to consider; hopefully not off topic.
Sent from my Liberty Phone (20 minutes passed, battery now at 78%).
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Hi PublicLewdness,
it depends on your usage and how long your Screen is activated. And how you transfer the data. In my Test WLAN with a less optimized coverage (1GB/s + many Walls) the Battery got drained faster instead of using 3 or 4g Mobil Web.
However XMPP and web browsing with addblocker, in best case like Emails just to have rss or an wget script. It did not use much energy. Tuba and endless scrolling eats up much energy.
To get along with it we need to take care for some space with small kb usage and how we can cut that information space to our best experience and save energy too. Think about a Smartwatch or a Tablet or a Ebook ready and a way how to transmit the data from your Librem5 every hour at 28 Minutes or at 55, to Update your newsfeed.
This way you can spare to unlock your phone every time and use your Display or to wake your Phone up for nonsense. In the other way you can add some Task it will try to do if your phone have the next wake up schedule.
About the Battery Life, i shut down the phone over night and have a 99% Load at the evening. It hold through 16 o Clock with less usage, or longer if i do not use Tuba. Wake it up at ~8 o clock.
When sleeping with Modem on so without Mobile data but 3 or 4g? Not sure if i test this, but i think it depends on your Cell-Tower Connection. I have WLAN off during Sleep (it connects after wake up) and my phone did not last so long even if i did not use it. With 3 or 4g, it hod mostly 14 hours… without usage. So i think it highly depends on your cell tower connection. Maybe i have a bad one… and this is why many like to use battery usage for fingerprinting. Because it depends on location.
Think about your usage and needs and how to save energy.
Christal
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It does. Poor signal strength causes the modem to consume more power. My estimates assume a reasonably good, urban-level signal coverage.
For the reference, this is the battery level of my phone during last 24 hours. You can see some light usage and 1.5 hours of a forgotten ssh session that prevented the phone from suspending 
Modem was on and connected. This is on a 3GB Librem 5 with a battery that isn’t exactly fresh by now.
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Another day, another chart:
An hour of active usage (browsing the Web), then suspended shortly, then left idling without suspending (because of a ssh session again 
) until it was about to shut down, then charged with a USB-A DCP source (1.5A input current limit). Modem and WiFi both on.
I think you can extrapolate everything you need from these charts, at least when it comes to the 3GB RAM version.
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Is there an apt pkg I can install to get that same Power Statistics wizard on my device’s usage/settings if we want to see a graph for Liberty Phone 4GB RAM/ 128GB eMMC?
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It seems to be gnome-power-statistics, part of the gnome-power-manager package.
sudo apt install gnome-power-manager
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Thank you all for the detailed responses !
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