Yes, it would have been nice if he pointed out that his conclusions are different because he reviewed them at different times in their product development stage. By the time that each product is sold from stock and the software is stable, I expect that the Librem 5 will be the preferable product, unless your only concern is cost. I expect that web browsing on the PinePhone will be so bad that a second device will be necessary to enjoy the web, but for occasionally looking up information, it may be adequate for some people. Maybe Ekioh’s Flow Browser will help. I expect that both future versions of these phones will have better futures. Once the common Linux distribution becomes a turnkey smartphone OS, I expect the hardware situation to greatly improve.
But to which costs? Purism could also make a faster computer and put all together to one SoC, but they didn’t for some important reasons. So hardware is limited to other companies products (CPUs etc) and how “open” they are or hardware is limited to privacy and security risks.
I’ll probably get a little flak for this here, but I kinda wish Purism had been less ambitious at least for the first iteration, and focused more on software and the basics. The external kill switches are a huge feature, and free/open hardware is obviously preferable, but I do worry that it can come back to bite us. (Of course, this is all with the benefit of highsight, so I don’t really blame Purism I guess.)
I was a late discoverer of L5 (May 2019 I think) and sometimes when reading discussions here, I do worry that Purism will have the rug pulled out from under them (some crucial hardware component becomes discontinued) and anyone who doesn’t have their L5 yet will be out of luck. The high cost of L5 is a real shocker to most people too (seemed so to Anthony), and I’m guessing that this is mostly due to hardware “pickyness” (no proprietary crapware).
I was also disappointed a little by Anthony’s review and especially how he really put down the L5. But he did say before that for mobile stuff, he wants something simple that ‘just works’. That kind of means he’s not the right target audience for a Linux phone at this stage.
I am not sure that I completely understand the question, but yes, they did build an atypical smartphone to fill a void in the market. They are using parts that were never intended for a smart phone. Maybe some of the manufacturers will keep Purism in mind when designing their next product. For the discrete modem design to work, Purism needs a lot of sales. And those sales need to be after the software is ready for the general public if they want to sell more in the future. In the mean time, they should be targeting Linux hobbyists with a security and/or privacy focus. But I was thinking along the lines of other hardware manufacturers seeing this as an opportunity. Most hardware companies do not do software very well, so having a Linux distribution ready to go with minimal customization will be a game changer for them.
Do you have a PinePhone? I have a PMOS CE. I bought the convergence package, mostly to support development, and so I would have it when my Evergreen finally arrives. PMOS was hugely frustrating and I eventually settled on Mobian-Phosh. I wouldn’t call it fast, but it’s perfectly usable. Hell, I’m even still booting from the SD card. As a web browsing device, both Epiphany and Firefox are much more pleasurable than Firefox on a cheap but new Android.
Back in August 2017 when Purism started, the only way to get a smartphone that ran on 100% free software was to either use the ancient i.MX 6, which have given horrible performance, or to use the upcoming i.MX 8M Quad which has taken years to get decent mainline Linux support (it still doesn’t have suspend to RAM) and critical things like its MIPI CSI2 camera interface are poorly documented. The other options were to use the A64 like the PinePhone did and hope that Mesa would eventually support it (which ended up happening in April 2019) or to give up on hardware kill switches, publishing open source schematics, and 100% free software, and use an older Snapdragon that has mainstream Linux support.
Given the choices, I think Purism took the only path that was truly capable of generating a large number of pre-orders, which was necessary to finance its dev work on Phosh. Without 100% free software and hardware kill switches, I don’t think Purism would have gotten enough pre-orders to pay its software developers, and it would have to use Ubuntu Touch/Lomiri or Plasma Mobile, which both have major problems in my opinion. Lomiri simply isn’t being well maintained–it only had 112 commits in the last year and only has 9 people with commit access, so basically Purism would have had to take over maintenance of the project which would have been very expensive. In the case of Plasma Mobile, it wasn’t at all complete in Aug. 2017, and it would have required a lot of dev work to get it ready, which also would have been expensive.
In other words, there were no good choices for Purism, and I frankly think that Purism chose the best course of all the difficult options it had. You might want to read my essay on why Purism created Phosh.
My PinePhone Mobian Edition wakes up just fine. At the first calling tone it starts waking up and by the second calling tone it starts playing its ring tone. Everytime I tested it.
EDIT: the calling phone and the PinePhone are in different mobile networks.
Hello, I think this is the critical problem with the Librem 5. At this price, you can’t consider monitoring your battery life all day, or having to buy an extra battery (extra purchase + opening the back cover every day can break it).
I hope they will find a solution with/without NXP… for a smartphone, and at this price, they have to.
Thank you for providing me with this information. This was on January 15th. Since then, what have been the improvements of the PM?
Many people have reported that they are missing calls with the PinePhone because it takes the cellular modem too long to wake up the system. It has even been reported by @Gavaudan on this forum:
The PINE64 February update says that Dylan in the community is working on the driver to fix this problem.
I saw that update, but now after last update (weekend of March 20th) my pinephone doesn’t lock when I hit the button, it just blanks the screen. I’m gonna see how plasma is doing, figure there must be a reason they decided to officially go with it.
I don’t think PINE64’s decision to preinstall Plasma Mobile was based on the technical merits. Both postmarketOS and Manjaro chose Phosh as the best interface to represent their distros when they released PinePhone Community Editions, despite having Plasma Mobile as an option and working on a Lomiri port. If you follow the comments on the PINE64 forum, both Phosh and Lomiri are more usable interfaces at this point in time.
Instead, Plasma Mobile fits PINE64’s model of community-based development, and Plasma Mobile has adopted the PinePhone as their target device for their development work. By preinstalling Plasma Mobile, the PinePhone probably will be able to help stimulate the development of Plasma Mobile, so it isn’t a bad decision from that point of view.
Ah I see. Still, I’ve always been curious (and a plasma fan, frankly). And it does actually lock the screen when I hit the button. I actually like the way it looks better than phosh, kinda makes me wish purism had gone plasma instead.
Yeah… Plasma is both a good bit prettier and a good bit less stable than phosh. Ah well, maybe in a few months.
phosh is stable as well - unless a distro ships outdated phoc (older than 0.7.0) 
Phosh 0.6.0 (manjaro’s current offering) isn’t too bad. Plasma, however, is.
I won’t challenge any of that and certainly I’m not suggesting I know for sure that bad decisions were made (especially since we have benefit of hindsight).
My “wish” is just about taking a longer term iterative approach to reduce risk. Perhaps you’re right that the whole thing would be infeasible without all open hardware - I’ve no idea.
But personally a Linux phone with hardware kill switches would have been enough to sell me on L5. It’s the insistence on non-proprietary/no-blobs hardware that I’m questioning the value of (there’s the flame bait part lol). It’s preferable, but it seems like it has been extremely difficult to do without an existing customer base, so was it worth whatever additional risk it adds?
I worry that maybe some obscure parts could be discontinued just due to passage of time and manufacturers moving on. Of course I know !@#$ all about hardware stuff, so maybe that’s not as big a deal as I guess. I do know that in software, choosing a much more “niche” library or tool tends to place you in a more risky support situation long term than using something extremely popular. Likewise, a hardware component that only a small number of low volume devices use seems like a good candidate for cost cutting and discontinuation.
If there had been any decent chips on the market in August 2017, I would agree with you, but Purism only had rotten choices for the SoC if it wanted to have hardware kill switches:
- Rockchip RK3399: 28nm; good CPU (2x 1.8GHz Cortex-A72, 4x 1.4GHz Cortex-A53); good GPU/VPU; sucks too much energy for a phone, but may be able to make it work with underclocking and big battery (like 6000 mAh); needs blobs to boot; needed proprietary Mali graphics driver in 2017; might be able to eliminate the boot blobs and proprietary graphics driver with lots of dev work; no Vulkan; video encoding limited to 1080p@30.
- Amlogic S912: 28nm; CPU (8x 1.6GHz Cortex-A53) is less powerful than the RK3399, but same problems and worse mainline Linux support.
- Broadcom BCM2837: 28nm; weak CPU (4x 1.2GHz Cortex-A53); OK GPU and VPU; FOSS driver for VideoCore graphics, but blobs needed to operate; Broadcom isn’t interested in working with small-scale device manufacturers, so this chip isn’t an option.
- Allwinner A64: 40nm; weak CPU (4x 1.2GHz Cortex-A53), GPU and VPU from 2015; not great energy efficiency but can work in a phone; needed proprietary Mali graphics driver in 2017, but might be able to eliminate it with lots of dev work; Allwinner violates the GPL and has no communication with the FOSS community.
- NXP i.MX 6Quad: 40nm; very outdated CPU (4x Cortex-A9 MP, 32-bit) from 2012 with weak performance, but can run on 100% FOSS, well documented chip, good forum, and good relations with the FOSS community.
- future NXP i.MX 8M Quad: 28nm; good GPU and VPU; weak CPU (4x 1.5GHz Cortex-A53), but 30%-50% better CPU performance than the A64; can run on 100% FOSS except for a Synapsys DDR timing blob; NXP promises to work to add support for mainline Linux and provide good documentation and answer questions on its forum, but its a new chip so risky.
Notice how all the available chips are using outdated planar process nodes. The only ones with decent CPU performance suck too much energy for a phone. On paper, the i.MX 8M Quad looked better than all the others, so I understand why Purism chose it, but it has caused massive delays. NXP has never fixed the silicon bugs in power management. NXP has taken years to add support to mainline Linux and there still is no suspend to RAM in the mainline driver. Purism ended having to do a lot of kernel work to support the chip and do commits to mainline Linux to get good video out. The documentation for the MIPI-CSI2 camera interfaces sucked and there weren’t other companies with good camera implementations that could Purism to copy, which forced Purism to do lots of painful trail and error to figure it out.
Yes, Purism probably could have delivered a Linux phone in early 2019 if it had used the Allwinner A64 processor (like the PinePhone), but the reason why the Librem 5 made headlines in August 2017 and generated so many pre-orders was its promise to run on 100% free software. If Purism had promised to produce a Linux phone with a proprietary graphics driver, people would have asked “why not just stick with the Nexus 5, since it has a better processor?” Remember that the Lima GPU driver for the Mali400-MP2 in the A64 wasn’t released in Mesa until April 2019. The positive reception and community support for the PinePhone would have been very different if it hadn’t been able to run on the free Lima driver.
If Purism had delivered the Librem 5 with the i.MX 6Quad, it would have been able to market it as running on 100% free software, but its performance would have sucked, and it wouldn’t have been a phone that a lot of people would have wanted to use. People talk about the interface lag in the PinePhone with the A64, but it would have been much worse with the i.MX 6Quad. Also a lot of distros are dropping support for 32-bit processors, so the goal in the crowdfunder of making a phone that will eventually be supported by many distros would have been dropped.
Purism probably would had been able to deliver the phone in 2019 if it had used Ubuntu Touch, instead of creating Phosh. However, Purism would have to spend massive resources trying to maintain alone a mountain of siloed code in Ubuntu Touch. In my opinion, Ubuntu Touch can only work if a bigger company like Canonical picks it up and promises to maintain it, but Purism frankly doesn’t have the resources to maintain it. In 2017 it wasn’t clear whether Canonical was going to to maintain Mir, so it would have been a huge risk for Purism. Also Purism would have had to put in a lot of work upfront to add support for Linux drivers (instead of using Android drivers through libhybris) and updating the code to work with a recent version of Qt that is still supported by the Qt Group.
Plasma Mobile would have required a ton of dev work to get ready for market, and then Purism would have all the problems with oFono and Halium and a separate mobile stack. With Plasma Mobile, Purism couldn’t count on any corporate support (except a few developers from Blue Systems and a little maintenance work on oFono and Halium by Jolla). It is easy to see why Purism wanted to use a standard desktop stack and ModemManager, and work in a system which gets developers from Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google. (See the link in my previous post for all the advantages of Phosh.)
If Purism had released the Librem 5 with Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile, it wouldn’t have been able to promise lifetime software updates (due to the maintenance costs) and it couldn’t be able to promise portability to all the major Linux distros which were key goals of the crowdfunding campaign. (UT and PM have since worked to get packaged in the major distros, but it wasn’t clear that they would do that in 2017.) With either Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile, Purism would have poured a ton of dev work into them and been locked into supporting one of them for a long time.
Plasma Mobile won’t cost nearly as much to maintain as UT, but Purism would probably have suffered the same delays as Purism has encountered with Phosh, because Plasma Mobile is just now becoming usable. Maybe Purism could have hurried its development a little bit, but it wouldn’t have improved the timeline much with Plasma Mobile, compared to developing Phosh.
Think about what would have happened if Purism had released the Librem 5 v1 with Ubuntu Touch and then announced that it was dropping all support for UT because it is a maintenance nightmare and started to work on a new Phosh interface for Librem 5 v2. What you are advocating in using an incremental approach would have generated tons of outrage and pissed off many customers. People who bought the Librem v1 would be mad as hell because Purism wasn’t supporting their phone any more and people would publicly question whether they should buy v2.
It is easy to criticize Purism for not delivering on time, but most of the criticism that I have read doesn’t honestly deal with these issues and truly evaluate the tradeoffs. We need to examine what were the real options on the table and think about whether they would have been any better than ones that Purism chose.
I wouldn’t say I was advocating for anything really (it’s too late anyway), it just seems like a lower risk approach. But I see there are a number of factors other than project risk in play here.