If like me you have made the L5 your daily driver, next release is really good news
Two really annoying things from day one (to me, maybe to you too) will be solved in the next release v0.12.0:
Only enable proximity sensor during calls
Unblank screen on incoming calls
Completely useless from a user side, but my developer side is talking here:
protocol: Sort wayland protocols alphabetically
phosh-wayland: Sort wayland protocol headers alphabetically
I hate when I read a code I don’t know and lists are not sorted or sorted in a architectural way which seems random when you don’t know the architecture
So to this kind of practices !
Of course those are not the only good things, you can check the changelog
It has a light sensor, and automatic brightness works, in that the screen will change brightness in response to light, but I think there’s still some work to be done in fine-tuning the response.
I completely agree with @wctaylor. Right now I am not using automatic brightness because its behaviour does not match my wants (which is a polite way of saying that it does not work well enough for me). It is no drama to adjust the brightness manually. (Tap top bar, tap Brightness line.) I am mostly using the phone indoors, where the brightness that I have set is completely adequate. Purism has more important things to fix in my opinion.
My big feature requirement is having the on / off switches on the outside which is why I did not buy a Pinephone. How well do those work? Does everything power off / on reliably? Do you ever need to reboot the phone to make it work?
For daily driving I only need phone calls and texting and have read the various threads about issues with both. How has your experience been with both functions as a daily?
Everyone’s requirements are different - mine certainly go beyond just calls and texts
It is a moving target. Problems that may been problems two months ago might not be problems today. Onwards and upwards …
Overall: I am very happy to have backed this project and very happy with the phone.
I look forward to continual improvements in the software - as there is missing functionality (for me) and a few glitches and some rough edges.
I’ve had no problems with the switches themselves.
I would say:
Power off? Yes
Power on? Some glitches (talking specifically about the hardware kill switches, not about the phone’s overall power on switch, I’ve never had a problem powering on the phone itself)
I’ve seen the occasional glitch where mobile data (and hence internet) does not come up even though mobile is on when WiFi is off. In that situation it may be necessary to turn mobile data off (in software) and turn it on again - or to use the hardware kill switch to turn the modem off and turn on again. I think this is a software issue.
I’ve seen the occasional glitch where after entering the SIM PIN the mobile does not come up at all and says “timeout” and just prompts again for the SIM PIN (but the incorrect SIM count hasn’t changed, fortunately, so no risk of locking the SIM out). In that circumstance I would use the HKS for the mobile to try again to get it to power on. I don’t know whether this is a Librem 5 software issue or a modem card software issue. Not sure that I’ve seen this recently.
Once the Librem 5 is on and in the right state it is highly reliable.
Maybe once or twice in 6 months. But I’ve had to reboot my iPhone once or twice in the last 6 months to make it work and that’s a product that has been maturing for 14 years!
I appreciate the feedback. I was expecting the potential issues on switching wifi / data / etc back on, I’m sure that we will eventually code for that.
I would like to clarify one thing: I think the v0.12.0 will come soon on byzantium
But for amber phones, probably will not come very soon, as we are still with v0.10.1, so we didn’t got the v0.11.0 yet
first you have to understand what I had before the L5 :
As I have a very different use of my L5 compared to @irvinewade
I give you a different view ;
My wifi/bluetooth switch is always OFF, and very rarely ON but every time I switch it ON : never experienced anything odd with WiFI, always worked well (I don’t use bluetooth, so can’t tell, I disabled it on the software side)
I’m regularly using the baseband switch going on/off : works well, I experienced 1 or 2 times what @irvinewade described with the PIN
For the micro/camera switch, you have to get used to it because the first times you get calls with your micro OFF and don’t understand why they don’t hear you
Until you switch it ON: every time it happened during calls the micro went ON good and fast
but the best thing to do is to switch it ON before answering
As for the mobile data, when the switch is ON, I have it always OFF in the software side until I need it (I don’t need it for calls), never experienced anything odd, always worked well never experienced what @irvinewade had about it
As for the reboot, I regularly shut it completely OFF, not because of some bug, but because of my habits
The hardest thing for me was coming from a 1 charge per week with my old phone to 2-3 charges per day, because I try to keep the charge between 20% and 80% to keep the Li-ion battery healthy
I just came up with new habits to adapt to this problem, and hope for a futur improvement for the power consumption when idle
So overall : same as @irvinewade, it may not be perfect, but very happy with the phone
I really appreciate your feedback and the use case that you describe. It is really nice to get some honest real world feedback from everyone.
That video is great! Ha! I wasn’t expecting you to answer that question quite that way.
It really sounds like all of my core needs will be covered by the device. I currently have an Axon M dual screen android. It’s my first android that I got after my blackberry died and I thought a dual screen would actually be able to replace a keypad but the android ecosystem of software is so awful to use that I only do calls and text anyway.
Strangely, over the last couple of years it has become really important to me to be able to turn off cameras / mics / bluetooth / etc on my devices. I thought the google app store would have all kinds of wonderful and interesting things in it to explore and it actually has turned out to be a dumpster fire and instead I need to just know my devices is not staring and listening to me at all times.
Because you have it OFF in software until you need it, maybe that is why you don’t experience the occasional oddity - since the workaround for me is to turn it off (in software) and turn it on again. Maybe.
I find that the hardware kill switches work perfectly, and the software is quick to recognise when they are turned on and off. I have zero complaints about them. The software switches… not so much (read on).
t took a while to get used to remembering to check the microphone kill switch before phone calls, but that’s really the only problem I’ve had with kill switches.
There are three issues I notice with the connectivity:
After a warm reboot, sometimes I have to toggle the WiFi kill switch to make the phone detect that it has a WiFi card. This only happens on reboots, not when booting from ‘off’.
Normally, I leave the Mobile Data switch set to off (in software), so that the cellular modem is just handling calls and texts. Sometimes, turning Mobile Data on seems to cause the driver for the modem to get into a state where it still reports the current signal type and strength, but data and texts don’t work. (Not sure about calls. Haven’t tested that.) When it gets into that state, my usual fix is a reboot. It can probably be fixed without a reboot, but usually I just want it working again quickly, so a reboot is the easy option. I don’t consider this a huge issue, because if I’m turning Mobile Data on, I am usually about to use Mobile Data, so if it’s stopped working I am going to notice almost immediately.
The turning Bluetooth on using the software controls is a bit glitchy. You turn it on and it still says Bluetooth is off, but the software switch says it’s on, and the status icon says it’s on. It takes some going in and out of the Bluetooth settings before it will show a list of devices to connect to. It seems to be one of those things where the more impatiently you prod at it, the more broken it gets. Sometimes it brings down the WiFi connection for a moment, and sometimes the WiFi/Bluetooth card actually needs to be power-cycled using the hardware kill switch in order to recover from the situation. It has improved though. It used to also have similar (worse) problems when connecting and disconnecting individual Bluetooth devices.
So, it seems to me that the issues are mainly with the software switches, rather than the hardware ones! (And the hardware switches help with recovering from software or firmware problems.)
I tend to reboot it and shut it down quite a lot anyway, so I don’t know how long it would go between reboots if I tried to avoid rebooting. Rebooting takes about 25 seconds, from confirming the reboot until the login pin pad responds to touch. I, too, am hopeful for battery life improvements, although it easily lasts me through the day if I remember to charge it when I can. (I’m not bothering with manually keeping the battery charge under 80%. I need some software to do that for me.)
Hi,
I do not know if you solved your problem but you or someone else should look at my post here : Bluetooth support for Librem 5 about setting the BT WIIF firmware.
to this kind of practices !