Why announce it here and then show nothing but some fluff we have seen long time ago - No marketing is better than bad marketing.
Then the recent blog post with the Librem 5’s in the ‘wild’. Everybody knows these are pics from Purism people only. Why the false claims? Why not be straight with us and communicate something along the lines of
The Aspen version is missing some key features which will be coming with the next version. We don’t want to send those to our customers so we wait until the next batch.
Todd basically confirmed this in his tear down video. Which has been great by the way.
Well, to be fair, they did say “all hardware components included” and then in batch birtch “All hardware included” with no added wording. So they are indicating that all the hardware is there in aspen, but that the case hardware can change, such as the antennas and heatsinks.
Friendly reminder that shipping a phone that users want but perhaps suppliers, manufacturers, and competitors don’t want to see is hard to do. Not in the sense that it creates competition but in the sense that it could change the rules of The Game. Mistakes will be made.
I am certainly someone who has chimed in and harped on Purism for their difficulties in communicating clearly. It falls short of their stated goals; however, it’s better than nothing. And! It continues to improve. Let’s not debase our position by unreasoned speculation or wild conspiracies. We are, after all, allies of some sort.
In that same shipping announcement, Chestnut was/is going to add capped switches, so “all hardware components” in Aspen/Birch required some interpretation then. We were not sure if they were adding caps to the bare switches on the circuit board, or replacing switch covers with capped versions. It looks like it will just be a component upgrade, but they filed it under Mechanical Design instead of Hardware. I am not sure if they ever intended to have a heat pipe. Purism could have chosen to do something less costly. I would assume that if they intended on having a thermal solution this expensive, that they would have advertised it at some point. I think that they were expecting to have a metal back that would have acted as a heat sink, but they wanted to improve the signal strength instead.
my suggestion for Purism is to replace “user-replaceable-battery” with semi-swappable because it looks as though they’ve outdone their first promises about the battery but not quite there yet with BB-q10s standard of “swappiness” > see > https://www.wordnik.com/words/swap
“Swappable” would be the most accurate description.
“Semi swappable” is kinda confusing
Hot swap, as @amosbatto suggested usually refers to ability to switch batteries while the device is on.
“User replaceable” as they originally posted, means that you still have to deal with screws and delicate work.
It would be nice if the phone could be powered from USB while swapping the battery. Phones are generally not intended to be run without batteries, but I would not be surprised if Purism made this possible. Maybe that is something that @BryanLunduke can check for us.
It would be nice if there were room for another battery in there somewhere so that we could get untethered hotswapping and slightly longer battery runtime. To be practical, the case would have to make it easier to remove just the large battery, such as an eject button and just needing to click in place. The space between the headphone jack and camera looks to be too small, but maybe if they were moved further apart in another version, this might be possible.
That hidden battery power might be from the charge left in the capacitors. That is standard voltage regulation, to prevent voltage sags when demand goes high. It would drain very quickly if the phone tried to use it for anything. Ideally, the hardware kill switches would not just cut the power to the m.2 slots, but also put a bleeder resistor across the power to discharge any residual power. Given how power hungry these radios are, I expect that will not make much of a difference (they would discharge quickly anyway), but if you are worried about a hidden CPU recording something, that might put your mind at ease (assuming that there are not any more things that hold a charge after a diode.
I don’t really have concerns for that.
The reason I shared these is to reaffirm hopes for external power use on L5. I still don’t remember if G Nexus could run without the battery for longer periods. My friend chained that his was.
Anyone actually know if L5 can display landscape? I don’t recall seeing it, but I would be a heavy user of it. I never liked having to use a third party tool to make screen rotation work correctly on Android.
