My guess is that nearly all software considerations will be the same. By the time Fir comes out, a lot of the rough edges will have been smoothed in Evergreen and those that haven’t are likely to be the same in Fir.
So the main consideration is the hardware, which in turn will mostly be of interest in respect of time-between-charges.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect the dimensions or weight to be different.
The way technology is, you can always postpone in order to get something better. Maybe Fir will be 5G-ready. Maybe this. Maybe that.
The link provided in the previous post is also a comprehensive discussion, well worth reading.
I already have my Evergreen, so my comments are by necessity theoretical.
If the Evergreen it is a nice, fancy, security & Libre phone, i am confident that Purism will make a Beautiful and redesigned phone on Fir, like Librem 14.
Very nice that i.MX 8M Plus planned on Fir has H.265 encoder and Cortex-M7. 
Is that confirmed somehow?
Or just year old, wiki conserved information?
Nothing’s confirmed.
As far as I know, Purism is still accepting orders for Fi (if you write Purism and say that you want to change your order from Evergreen to Fir). On Nov. 21, 2020, Purism’s @joao.azevedo confirmed that Purism is still planning to release Fir after Evergreen.
NXP still hasn’t started mass production of the i.MX 8M Plus or even published its data sheet, so I suspect that is the reason why Purism hasn’t said anything about Fir’s design and has not confirmed that it will use the Plus processor.
Given the delays from NXP in releasing the Plus and how long it will probably take to get mainline Linux support for the new features in the Plus, I think it likely that Fir will end up using the i.MX 8M Quad, but increase the RAM to 4GB and the eMMC to 64GB or 128GB. I would love to see other changes in the design, like moving the microSD and cellular modem to a USB 3.0 bus and the addition of a USB extension port in the back with pogo pins.
Given the delays and issues they are experiencing with the L 14 I wouldn’t expect Fir to be shipping this year and it’s difficult to even guess if next year is feasible. So plenty of time for changes and reconfiguring hardware, design, etc. on that model.
Either way they won’t be getting my money for Fir until they have reached shipping parity for Fir, and orders are being shipped within a week or two of placing an order. I just can’t afford to shell out that kind of money and not have a phone, that I would need, for that long.
More likely that I would buy a pine phone or something else cheap in the meantime to replace my aging spyphone.
What new features are you referring to?
Why do you think Fir will likely have increased RAM and eMMC storage capacity?
When Purism announced the Librem 5 in Aug. 2017, 3GB RAM and 32GB eMMC were standard specs for a mid-range phone, but in 2022 when I assume Purism will start crowdfunding for Fir, those will be bottom-of-the-barrel specs. Only 16 out of the 157 new phone models in 2021 have 32GB of storage or less, according to the gsmarena.com database. Purism told us in late 2019 that it had gone way over budget with the Librem 5, so I don’t think that it could afford to increase the specs of the Librem 5 v1 when it announced price increases.
However, if Purism wants to market Fir as a convergent PC and to charge a premium price for it, it is going to be hard to sell the phone if it doesn’t provide the max amount of RAM (which is 4GB with the i.MX 8M Quad or 8GB with the i.MX 8M Plus) and provide an adequate amount of storage for a convergent PC. Plus, there is the simple fact that the price per GB has fallen a lot since 2017, so providing more RAM and storage shouldn’t cost that much in 2022 (assuming that the current shortages and price hikes are a short-term phenomenon). Once the PinePhone v2 comes out with the RK3566, it is going to be hard for Purism to sell the Librem 5, so it is going to have to drop the price or provide better specs.
I’m already in Fir batch as a pre order backer. Who knows when ill see it but boy will it be worth the wait…I hope 
While you may be on point regarding your citation for gsmarena’s database, Purism prioritizes very differently from other phone manufacturers. They focus on freedom, not specifications, and are unwilling to compromise on that. While it may seem that Purism has incentive to provide other configurations in the future due to competition, there is one major limiting factor against that, which is availability of hardware from manufacturers, as Purism, among other companies, source their hardware elsewhere.
As for Fir being difficult to sell marketed as a convergence device without maximizing RAM, or increasing storage configurations, I argue that GNU/Linux distributions has always had low hardware requirements, and more so in the case of mobile Linux distributions. PureOS Hephaestus 9.0 requirements, for example, are this list:
- A 64-bit processor
- At least 1GB of RAM
- At least 15GB of disk space
While more RAM is better for usability, I do not see how that point alone would determine the ability for Fir to sell or not. The point of convergence is to be able to use the phone like a desktop (and vice versa), but that does not necessarily mean to replace all desktops use cases. That is why Purism offers other products, like the Librem 14, Librem Mini, and Librem Server. For a low-powered, power-efficient convergence device, that meets all of the requirements to use PureOS and various other operating systems, Evergreen is already more than enough for convergence, and if your prediction of the i.MX 8M Plus is correct, so will Fir as well, even if Purism decided to regress and reduce the amount of RAM (assuming PureOS requirements have not increased since).
Also, your argument for storage can be easily challenged by one lone fact, which is the microSD slot. If you need to increase the amount of storage available, you can easily expand it by placing a microSD/HC/XC card into the side tray. Unlike many other phones on the market, which have already removed that option, the Librem 5 preserves that choice.
Even if the PinePhone v2 does come out with the RK3566, that is not going to necessarily mean it will be difficult for Purism to sell the Librem 5, as they target different audiences. Purism has made several videos demonstrating convergence and how accessible it can be to the average consumer, whereas Pine64 has hardly done anything similar. Accessibility, and thus convenience, are huge selling points for consumers, and with that point, I would argue that it would be more difficult to sell the PinePhone solely as a convergence device due to the learning curve, whereas the Librem 5 already has it handled because it already works out-of-the-box without any configuration needed, even if it may cost more for that convenience.
Currently though the uSD storage reads 5x to 6x more slowly than the eMMC drive. So increasing the storage via the uSD card comes with a compromise. Maybe this is a software problem and it will be resolved in due course.
The RAM is soldered in, and so if anything, one should err on the side of caution i.e. on the side of “too much”. For the RAM at least, there is no need to compromise on freedom if Purism decides to go up to 8 GB.
My own view regarding both RAM and disk is that actual experience of usage should inform a decision as to whether to increase one or both when Fir is being specced out.
What about using Android apps in Anbox? It could be a very popular use case.
Again though let’s see whether 3 GB is adequate to run Anbox and an Android app therein.
The Librem 5 with PureOS/Phosh is using most of the standard GTK/GNOME stack and the standard GNOME applications. Yes, Phosh requires less resources than GNOME Shell, but the applications are essentially using the same amount of RAM and processing power as a standard Linux desktop, and those hardware requirements will probably keep increasing over time as the application developers expect PCs to keep getting more powerful. Once you open a bunch of tabs in Firefox or open a big document in LibreOffice, you start running into the limits of 3GB of RAM pretty quick, and you get a subpar convergence. 3GB RAM is enough for just a Linux phone, but if Purism wants to market the Librem 5 as a convergence phone, then the Librem 5 needs to have more RAM to be a useful desktop PC, and I don’t see any way around that.
If Purism had put the microSD card on a USB 3.0 bus (instead of a USB 2.0 bus), then the expandable storage would be a lot more useful. I notice a big difference in the speed on my current phone (Redmi Note 7) when I’m taking photos and saving to the eMMC vs saving to the microSD card.
In my opinion, Purism made a poor choice deciding to use expensive automotive RAM. 3GB of Micron automotive RAM now costs $26.21 per unit (in a lot of 1360) whereas 4GB of Micron mobile RAM normally costs $5.78 (in lot of 1000), and 8GB costs between $15 and $20, when we aren’t in a global chip shortage. It is a question of whether Purism wants to do the testing to verify normal mobile RAM, rather than using the few models of automotive RAM that NXP recommends for the i.MX 8M.
Financing dev work is expensive, and people like me who value Purism’s dev work will buy the Librem 5 no matter what specs it has. The question is how to reach an audience outside the hard-core enthusiasts like us, and I think that having enough RAM and storage for good convergence will be a key part of being able to reach a broader audience. (Of course, it would help if we can convince NXP to add a few Cortex-A7x cores to the Plus or convince Rockchip to make the RK35xx run on 100% free software. 
)
I wonder where is the option to pay more and get max RAM for Librem 5.
If anyone from Purism is reading along, here’s a data point from someone who is still in the queue for Evergreen: I think that RAM is going to be the limiting factor for me, in terms of making the phone useful. (As my day-to-day system I use a laptop with 16 GB RAM, which I regularly exhaust…) I would be happy to pay more if I could get a version of the Librem 5 with more RAM (say, 6 or 8 GB). So if it could be confirmed that Fir will get such an amount of RAM, even if it is hardware-wise the same otherwise, I would highly consider getting it.
Don’t say that! The screen is just good enough to not dock it with a Monitor each time you use it for more then a hour 
Changed back to evergreen today. From what I see Evergreen looks ok - Software for Linux phones is improving every day - biggest concern to me still seems to be background run time, but I guess we are getting there. Seeing that the phone will hopefully arrive in 2022 I assume that fir can also take a couple of years.