Good evening,
Has anyone seen or heard of any current updates on the Librem 5? I it is due to arrive in a little over 2.5 months.
I am hopeful we will have heard about the storage space, the battery has been fixed. I would have hoped we would have heard and would have seen a true mock up of the phone we all have agreed to purchase.
I am hopeful there are no issues with the April 2019 date as told to each of us before Christmas.
If anyone has any insight, that will be great.
I am looking forward to pairing my purchased Librem5 with the Librem15 I have also procured.
I was sitting in on a BoF at FOSDEM last weekend, where the Librem 5 project lead and some of the main devs were present and answered questions. Right now things on the hardware front are a bit stalled until the end of chinese new year mid of February. A lot of parts work just fine, some do not properly work together yet. There is a lot of work going on in different teams, hardware and software.
The battery problem seems to be still worked on. Challenging was the word that project lead Nicole Faerber used most in her presentation. She said, one thing is for sure: the Librem 5 will come. There was a lot of confidence in the room that the problems can be fixed in time, so until now the delivery date of April still stands.
I really don’t mean that as a criticism, but at this stage is clear that there is no way they can ship working hardware in April. That’s fine, but being honest about it would be better.
I don’t think anyone would take your comments as a criticism. We are all a part of the forums due to our belief in Purisms products and the privacy the products brings. With the products coming in a few months, I would not assume the products are foolproof and will be with an issue or two when released. I believe my thoughts still hold true in that there should be more frequent updates as we hedge closer to our devices being shipped. As you have seen on this particular thread, the device is having a few challenges of note. I hope there is not a delay. When a provider of a product goes quiet, then you unfortunately allow in thoughts of delays or issues with hardware. I can’t wait until I am able to use my new Librem5.
My take on this is that later this month, after chinese new year festivities are over, Purism will be able to have a better estimate of what can be achieved until the proposed date and what not and then make an official announcement. If it needs to be delayed, be it delayed. I have no problem with that.
Well if Purism had to delay the Librem 5 because the hardware part is not quite ready yet (still with that silicium problem) I would be a bit sad to have to wait a bit more but I prefer to have something that stick to what is planed than something that was rushed because of the time limit.
I agree with both comments above. My only desire is for some transparency in status. Most of us have been waiting quite a while for the device and would have no issue waiting a bit longer. It could be the company is truly behind and does not want to come out and say they are delayed a second time. The job of their Project/Program Manager cannot be fun. That being said, we are all like school children on Christmas…waiting for Santa…lol.
Also notable is that they can’t afford to do the same rush with the phone as they did with the dev-kit (where the LCD panel still doesn’t work 2 months after shipping without special HW to configure it).
Knowing Purism and how transparent they usually are I would be very surprised if they did delay the phone without telling us, I think that for now the state of things is that they don’t know (due to Chinese new year) if they will need to delay or not but in the meaning time they stick to what was planed.
Don’t take my word for it as I’m just assuming things here.
I’m absolutely calm about any delay. I’ve been using my samsung galaxy s2 for more than 5 years (and counting), i’m pretty sure i can survive a delay
It would actually be easier. It would almost be one line entry on their news feed link on their homepage. The one that is a challenge is if there is a real life delay.
I don’t think I would be the only person who would have a problem with Purism making regular posts of “no significant changes have occurred since the last update.” It would just condition us to ignore new posts from them because interesting information would be so widely spaced out. I also take their relative silence to mean that they’re hard at work trying to get everything ready for the phone’s release, and that’s where I want their efforts to be right now because getting that ready is more important (to me) than reading about what’s done so far and what’s left.
With their current rate of updating the “news” page I would anticipate the next update to happen the week of the 18th. This is not a guarantee, but it matches with the roughly every 2 weeks that they’ve been providing updates recently.
Please understand, we all are approximately 2.5 months away. When you have a roll out of this magnitude, it s not a problem with routine posts from Pursim that coincide with the issues they also manage. No one said it have to be every month on a Tuesday, during a full moon, at 930PM EST. What is being said is we are all anxiously waiting and we all are willing to accept some minor delay. It goes back to effective communication.
Sure, we all agree to that. On the other hand, quote from September:
February is the Chinese New Year and effectively the entire country is shut down for that month. Therefore, we can only restart the production ramp-up process in March, with first units to be produced in April.
What shoud a news post at this point give us? “Guess what happened: no progress with our hardware partners in China, as unexpectedly they don’t respond to our mails.”
Also, that is nothing to put in a blog post, because it does not make a good impression on those that don’t know the background. (That’s also part of effective communication).
It could be communicated to the backers via email. But then that could create rumors.
So, I’d be okay if the next update comes in march, and then it has actual content.
Two more notes:
That quote already leaves room for interpretation that the phone production could begin end of April, and thus shipping would be in May.
Even if they anticipate further delay, it would not be the smartest to hint at that right now, during a time they hardly get Chinese feedback. In march they have a much better chance to give fact-based estimates. Also, announcing a delay is nothing they want to do on a regular basis. If they have to do it, they’ll want to make sure it will be exactly one more time (again, part of effective communication).
Well, we need to be better at communicating, but that shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone.
Things like Chinese New Year are planned for, so other things can be done during that time. For some of us, it doesn’t directly affect our work because there are so many other things to do.
Other than the points in the original message in this topic, what other pieces of information are people looking for in a status update?
I initially missed this topic because I thought it would be about software updates…
@david.boddie The one thing keeping me from purchasing a Librem 5 is NXP errata e11171 and e11174 (referenced in this post: https://puri.sm/posts/2018-09-librem5-hardware-roadmap-announcement/). It doesn’t look like this errata has been fixed yet. So I would like to hear if a fix for this errata is still expected, and if not, how does Purism plan to compensate for this errata?
