Librem 5 Ready-To-Market?

[amarok]

I have a good AT&T signal all around here at my house. T-mobile was a problem before I switched, because of the coverage problem you described. As a result my calls over 3G (on my Android, which is non-VoLTE) frequently didn’t ring in or even connect to voicemail, and I sometimes couldn’t call out. So I had to switch to the Death Star company.

[Kyle_Rankin]

My input device is Internal microphone and the volume is to the max. I believe that the calls application also does something special to the pulseaudio settings to avoid an echo between the two microphones. Perhaps @dos can speak to that.

[amarok]

@Kyle_Rankin, @dos Yeah, my input was also set to internal mike. Not sure where the volume was, but I cranked it up. It’s acceptable, but not crystal clear. As for the slight muffling I mentioned before, it wasn’t terrible, and it may be a little better now.

Another issue is that the proximity sensor isn’t disabling the screen when I bring the phone to my ear. As a result it transmits some extraneous sounds during the call, just from touches to the screen.

Edit: Although I can turn off the screen manually when I’m on a call.

[buzzLightyear]

@amarok you may want to try the PulseAudio pactl command to see if it helps.

$pactl set-sink-volume 0 25%

(If 0 does not work then try 1, 25% is the limit that you want to increase the volume to. I’ve tried it upto 300% on my desktop. You may want to set to 150 or 200%)

[dos]

@buzzLightyear

If 0 does not work then try 1

Please don’t do random things this way, you’ll likely end up unknowingly setting the volume of the modem’s device and forgetting about it since it’s not displayed anywhere in the UI

I recommend using tools like alsamixer and pulsemixer instead so you can see exactly what you do while you do it.

[dos]

So I just made a few recordings of me talking through Librem 5 Dogwood and Nokia N900. The receiving (and recording) end was Librem 5 Birch where the calls have been initiated:

https://dosowisko.net/l5-call-audio/call-rec-l5.flac
https://dosowisko.net/l5-call-audio/call-rec-n900.flac

And here are the exact same calls recorded directly on the devices I’ve been talking to:

https://dosowisko.net/l5-call-audio/call-rec-direct-l5.flac
https://dosowisko.net/l5-call-audio/call-rec-direct-n900.flac

Seems like we’re better at recording the room’s acoustics than N900 because of the stereo mics. The modem’s audio does sound a bit different between the devices. I wonder whether it’s the PulseAudio’s intelligibility enhancer’s output being slaughtered by the GSM network’s codec? When I get some time for that I’ll try to play with some knobs and check whether it can be improved further, but it seems good enough to me for now so I don’t think it’s the most urgent thing to do at the moment. Anyone’s free to play with it by themselves and report the results though

[amarok]

Very helpful. Thanks for posting these. The L5 definitely picks up more ambient space.

[wimdows]

@Kyle_Rankin

it’s also worth noting that as the Librem 5 does not yet support VoLTE

There has been a lot of ‘noting’ of this particular L5 feature on this forum lately. If I am not mistaken, this is the first time there is something of an official notification.

When I first learned about this - in conjunction with the fact that the lack of voLTE could/will result in a ban from several providers - I wasn’t happy.

If there is one thing that disqualifies a phone from being ready-to-market, it’s if you can not use it for making calls.

Maybe this is a good thread/moment to tell us what Purism is planning to do to resolve this.

(I know it would be wonderful if Broadmobi adds voLTE to the BM18. But what if they don’t?)

[LinuxNew]

Hi Kyle,

Can the L5 Evergreen as it is right now recieve 4G?

[dos]

@LinuxNew

Can the L5 Evergreen as it is right now recieve 4G?

It can and does connect to 4G network and use it for data connection. Since there’s no VoLTE, it automatically drops to 3G (or 2G if there’s no 3G reception) when calling.

[JR-Fi]

This is just with the Broadmobi modem and is a modem thing, not an L5 thing as such, isn’t it?
Has the Thales modem been tested yet and shouldn’t it work?

[dos]

Ah yes, VoLTE is a modem thing and AFAIK it’s supposed to work with PLS8. Personally I haven’t tested it by myself yet, but I likely will soon. From what I know there were some tests made in the past, but I wasn’t involved in it back then

[spacemanspiffy]

Now I know how to pronounce you last name

[amarok]

@dos Yeah, I’m sticking with “dos.”

[ozpi]

This is wildly disrespectful to pine64 and the maintainer of other phone operating systems. Kde, ubports, etc dont really get anything from the librem project. This project is not the holy tree from which all mobile linux variant spring from a lot of other projects actually have to get an L5 and make THEIR stuff work for L5 not the other way around

[tracy]

What? Not CP/M ?!?!

[amosbatto]

@wctaylor

People also love to complain about the price and ask why they should pay for the L5 when the cheaper Pinephone exists, not knowing that a tremendous amount of the software running on the Pinephone was made usable by the development work Purism did (funded in large part by L5 orders). And also missing the differences in hardware and what it took to get working drivers for the L5 hardware.

@ozpi

This is wildly disrespectful to pine64 and the maintainer of other phone operating systems. Kde, ubports, etc dont really get anything from the librem project.

Maybe @wctaylor should have been more specific and said “Phosh users,” but he is pointing out something that I have also frequently encountered online. A lot of the PinePhone’s success has depended on Phosh, and I see little acknowledgement of that fact by the critics of the Librem 5 on r/Purism and YouTube. (I haven’t seen much criticism of Purism on the PINE64 forum, so that is a sign that most of this criticism isn’t coming from actual PinePhone users.)

When I created this poll on the PINE64 forum, it got 54 votes by 36 people and I was surprised by the results:

Which interface(s) do you use on the PinePhone?

Interface	Votes	% of voters
Phosh	25	69%
Plasma Mobile	10	28%
Lomiri	6	17%
Hildon	1	3%
Silica	1	3%
Android	2	6%
Other	9	25%
Total voters	36

Further proof that the PinePhone depends on Purism’s software development:

• 9 of the 17 distros for the PinePhone include Phosh, whereas 3 of the 17 include Plasma Mobile and 2 of the 17 include Lomiri.
• 2 out of the 3 PinePhone Community Editions have preinstalled Phosh.
• The distros that people report as being the best on the PinePhone are generally Mobian/Phosh and Manjaro/Phosh.

I think the PinePhone is great because it brings new users and developers to Phosh and they are helping to package Phosh in many different distros, so we should be happy that Phosh helps PINE64 sell the PinePhone. My hope is that the Librem 5 will become a way for people to use Lomiri and Plasma Mobile as well, so the Librem 5 can help contribute users to the UBports and KDE communities as well.

[wctaylor]

@ozpi That is fair. I wasn’t thinking about the other environments when I said that, but I had previously seen reports like what @amosbatto posted suggested phosh was the dominant environment.

[jrial]

@kieran

I am pretty sure that only original crowdfunders are getting the phone at this stage, and probably only early backers from among the original crowdfunders. Clearly that group has different expectations about what “ready” means and about what level of completeness is available today.

Yup. A barebones phone that would gain functionality through software updates is exactly what we were promised. Frankly, when I backed, I seem to recall I was expecting something that would run Linux, have only a minimal set of applications (think: calculator, notes, probably a browser, maybe a media player), and would be able to do little more than make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and hold a charge long enough to make it through the day. I was honestly expecting the feature set of a Nokia 3310 for the first couple of months.

@tracy

Actually I dislike the humongous amount of pixels they default to on phone cameras. You want to transmit it via message and it ends up being converted to a smaller size anyway and it may just eat up monthly bandwidth if you’re on a cheap service.

I disagree. You can always go into your camera settings and lower the quality of the images to save on disk space and/or bandwidth if you don’t want or need high-res images. You can also tell your phone to upload over WiFi only, if you’re only concerned about the bandwidth on your cheaper plan and not so much about the disk space required. But for those of us who do want or need higher resolutions, there’s no way to toggle a software setting that magically allows us to make high-res pictures with that low-res sensor.

That said, the sensor quality matters a lot more than raw pixel count. And the quality of the optics, and even the software, obviously.

[kieran]

@jrial

You can always go into your camera settings and lower the quality of the images

Digital camera - yes. Phone camera - not so sure about that.

I had a quick look at my spiPhone and I couldn’t see such a setting. Happy to learn still, even though said phone is in the last few weeks(?) / months(?) of use, if you know where the setting is.

I’m OK for the L5 phone camera just to take the photo at full sensor res all the time but we don’t want to confuse pixels with quality, as you say.

Later on someone can add a setting to dial down the resolution used to capture an image - and then everyone will be happy.