Just some of my thoughts about the FuriPhone FLX1:
First of all, I’m glad to see another hardware seller for Linux phones, and I’m especially glad that the FLX1 is based on Debian and Phosh, because that brings more users to the platform and potentially more people working to help develop it. Hopefully Bardia Moshiri and the Droidian Project will upstream their work so it benefits Debian/Mobian/PureOS and Phosh. Moshiri mentions that he wants to work on some improvements to Phosh, so that potentially could benefit all Phosh users.
We do need a Linux phone on the market with decent specs for people who want a good camera capable of shooting video, good thermals and decent battery life. The best chip on the market for that purpose is probably the Qualcomm QCM6490, because Qualcomm offers Windows, Android, Linux and Ubuntu support for this SoC. The WiFi only version of the chip (QCS6490) is supported under the Qualcomm longevity program till Feb. 2036, but I’m guessing that the QCM6490 with a cellular modem is only supported till 2031, since the Fairphone 5 and SHIFTphone 8 which uses the same chip is promising security updates till then. Qualcomm also makes the more powerful QCM8550 with Linux support, but it appears too power-hungry for a phone.
However, making a phone with the QCM6490 requires a lot of custom engineering which a small phone startup like Furi Labs can’t easily finance. I’m guessing that Furi Labs only had the funds to use a standard phone design from an ODM, so doing a custom design like the PinePhone, Librem 5, Fairphone or SHIFTphone is out of the question, and I’m guessing that Qualcomm doesn’t offer a phone design for the QCM6490 that ODMs can use, so that means a lot of hardware iterations to get it right. Nicole Faerber says that Purism did at least a dozen iterations of Librem 5’s main board.
In my opinion, Furi Labs should have made an agreement with Fairphone or SHIFT to sell the Fairphone 5 or SHIFTphone 8 with Linux, similar to how Murena sells the Fairphone 5 with e/OS. Of course, that would have limited the FLX1 to European cellular networks, and Bardi Moshiri is from Canada, so that may be why Moshiri didn’t go that route. Another factor may have been the high cost of the hardware, which wouldn’t have left much of a margin for Furi Labs.
However, there are drawbacks for a Linux phone based on the MediaTek Dimensity 900 SoC. MediaTek only supports Android for its Dimensity SoC’s, so that means running Linux on top of Halium/libhybris with an Android kernel. MediaTek appears to only support 3 releases of Android for its Dimensity chips, and the Dimensity 900 was released in May 2021 with Android 11, using the android11-5.4 kernel. If MediaTek never upgrades that kernel, which is common MediaTek practice, then that kernel will be supported until Android 13, which should get 3 years of security updates between August 2022 and August 2025. According to PhoneDB, there were only 24 phone models that used the Dimensity 900 chipset and the last one was the Vivo Y100 5G 2023 released in Feb. 2023, so I don’t think MediaTek will have much industry pressure to upgrade its kernel in order for Dimensity 900 devices to be supported for longer.
It is unlikely that you will be able to switch the device to a mainline Linux kernel after official support for the Android kernel ends. MediaTek does not release much info to the Linux community, which is why its Dimensity chips don’t run on mainline Linux. MediaTek only releases the source code to companies buying its chips, so in theory Furi can release the GPL2 code in the Android kernel, but the blobs to run the WiFi, modem, etc, probably won’t run with a newer kernel, so you are probably stuck with the android11-5.4 kernel.
Another challenge with using Linux with Halium/libhybris is that it isn’t compatible with ModemManager, so the phone has to use ofono, which isn’t as well maintained as ModemManager. ModemManager is supported by the big Linux companies, whereas ofono doesn’t have much corporate support. ofono is getting an average of 1.1 commits per day, compared to 1.4 commits per day for ModemManager, but the number of devs contributing to ofono is much smaller. Now that Plasma Mobile has dropped support for Halium, Ubuntu stopped developing Ubuntu Touch and WebOS/LuneOS has faded into obscurity, there are fewer users of ofono.
I wish that Furi Labs had based the FLX1 on a Snapdragon SoC. Qualcomm publishes more info/code for its Snapdragon chips and collaborates with Linaro and Yocto, so higher-end Snapdragon models get supported in the mainline Linux kernel. Of course there are a lot of blobs that can’t be included in the mainline kernel, so some components won’t work, but Furi Labs could have chosen an SoC that is at least partially functional with a mainline kernel. For example, the Snapdragon 845 (8 gen 1), Snapdragon 855 (8 gen 2) and Snapdragon 865 (8 gen 3) got initial mainline support starting with Linux 5.17, 6.3 and 6.8, respectively. Moreover, Snapdragon 8 SoC’s support DisplayPort Alt Mode over USB-C, so it would have been possible to sell the phone as a convergent PC, whereas the Dimensity 900 doesn’t support video out. I’m guessing that Moshiri wanted to limit the price, so that is why he didn’t use a Snapdragon 8, but he could have selected a model with a cheaper Snapdragon 778G, 778G+ or 782G chipset for only a little more than the Dimensity 900 (which was marketed as a Snapdragon 695 competitor).
Of course, switching to a mainline kernel and using a distro like postmarketOS probably means that some components won’t work, so I can see why Furi Labs isn’t bothering to worry about mainline Linux support, but I personally want a device that I can play with for years in the future, even if some stuff doesn’t work. Given the financial challenges of a Linux phone company like Furi Labs surviving in the long term, it is better policy in my opinion to base the hardware on a platform which the community can support.
Having said all that, I don’t want to criticize Furi Labs too much, because I think its developers are making a good contribution to the community by taking Mobian and configuring it to work on top of Hallium. Unlike companies like Volla Phone, Planet Computers and f(x)tec which do little software development, I think Furi is worth supporting because it is trying to maintain its own Linux distro and we do need a variant of Mobian that can run on Android kernels. The economics of creating a new Linux hardware company that does any software development are really challenging and it needs people to buy its products to make that business model work.
In order for Linux phones to grow out of their minuscule niche, we need phone models that are capable of appealing to mainstream users, who expect a better processor, decent cameras, long battery life and better thermals. The Dimensity 900 benchmarks 5.9 times higher than the i.MX 8M Quad in the Librem 5/Liberty for single CPU and 4.8 times higher for multi-CPU (Dimensity 900’s Geekbench 5 single CPU: 729, Multi-CPU: 2147; i.MX8MQ’s Geekbench 5 single CPU: 122, multi-CPU: 444), so it has the processing power to function more like a conventional smartphone than the Librem 5/Liberty and PinePhone.
The Linux purists are going to opt for the Librem 5/Liberty or PinePhone, but for people who don’t mind blobs and Android kernels, I would recommend the FuriPhone FLX1 over its competitors. The MediaTek Helio P70 in Planet Computer’s Cosmo Communicator, the Helio G85 in the Volla Phone 22, the Helio G99 in the Volla Phone X23 and the Snapdragon 622 in the F(x)tec Pro1-X all have the same challenges as the FuriPhone. There is minimal mainline Linux support for the Snapdragon 662 and Helio G85, so almost nothing on Pro1 X and Volla Phone 22 works with a mainline kernel, and the X23 and the Cosmos won’t even boot with PostmarketOS. The Cosmos is stuck with the kernel from Android 9 and its version of Debian hasn’t been updated since April 2021. The two Volla Phones are sold with a custom AOSP derivative based on Android 12, but I suspect that the Volla Phone 22 still uses the android-4.19-q kernel from Android 10, since that is what the first G85 phones used, so I doubt they are still getting security updates. The Snapdragon 662 on the Pro1-X is still getting security updates, but many of the people who pre-ordered the Pro1-X never got it. Rather than buying the Volla Phone which is focusing its efforts on developing an AOSP derivative, it is better in my opinion to buy the FuriPhone to help develop the Droidian Linux distro.
