Librem 5 Ready-To-Market?

That is the exact point I had made. Camera megapixels do not matter much for me too. Since you brought up the National Geographic point, I think a good picture has more to do with the lighting effect and ability of person to take great shots.

A CHDK kind of hack can definitely be thought of once Librem 5 camera software is available for use.

Hi Kyle_Rankin,

As reported by amarok cellular calls made using a SIM are somewhat “muffled” & the call quality is not great, was this issue known before shipping?

Thanks in advance

LinuxNew

I’ve had the opposite experience. The call quality on my Dogwood phone was good and Evergreen was better. When I’ve made calls people seem to think the audio quality is good. I wonder if amarok needs to investigate mixer settings, has a bad signal where they are, or something else.

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With respect to cellular calls, it’s also worth noting that as the Librem 5 does not yet support VoLTE, the phone drops from LTE to 3g/2g when making traditional cellular calls. I’ve noticed in some areas where I’ve had strong LTE signal I had weak 3g/2g signal and that could account for it as well.

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It will be interesting to see what others say.

Is call quality perfect or good and a work in progress?

Having cellular calls will be important.

Can 4G work?

I don’t know how you’d define “perfect” but at least in my personal experience and the experience of others on the team I’ve heard from, it’s as good as any other cellular phone.

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@Kyle_Rankin Could you post a screenshot of your audio settings, so I can match mine to yours? I’ll check if the problem resolves and report here.

Edit: Or just write your settings for me on this thread.

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Can you recieve 4G amarok?

And good idea :+1::+1:

This is a non-Voice-over-LTE modem at the moment, so it cannot engage in a phone connection on 4G yet.

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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. :grimacing:

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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.

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@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.

@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%)

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 :stuck_out_tongue:

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

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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? :smiley: 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 :slight_smile:

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

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?)

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Hi Kyle,

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.

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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?

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