no signal yet or is it solved? My uSD is still not working
Quick update:
- Lately, on byzantium, bluetooth started working well (for listening to the music, microphone not tested)
- GPS is working with pure maps! Not too easy to setup right now, but working
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Thank you very much for posting your experience.
This is pretty much what I am expecting my experience to be like. It’s exactly like what we went through just before Ubuntu got going and we were trying to kinda get Linux desktop to work on all kinds of hardware profiles.
This time around there is an organization that has a bit more control over the hardware and some of the software side of things.
I am still amazed how the amazing Pinephone team and the amazing Librem team are making Linux phones a thing where Mark Shuttleworth poured millions into the project and couldn’t get it to work. Maybe Marks goals were to big and should have scaled the project down to the bare minimum necessary for a niche market.
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Mark Shuttleworth didn’t pour anything into Ubuntu Edge. He set up a crowdsorcing campaign that was asking for £30 million. And it reached only half. He was too greedy.
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Is that what happened? Ohh … you are right.
Imagine that!!! Holy moly. 15 million? That is a lot of money to fail at bringing a phone to the market.
Canonical did manage to bring a 5 phones (BQ Aquarius E4.5, E5 and M10 and Meizu MX4 and PRO 5) to market between Feb. 2015 and Apr. 2016. However, in July 2013, Canonical tried to crowdfund its own “Edge” smartphone, and gave up the project after a month after raising $12.73 million of its $32 million goal.
Smartphone cost more to design and assemble back then, since the Chinese ODM market wasn’t as developed and it wasn’t as easy for companies to find the right services in Shenzhen as today. However I think a larger part of it was that Canonical had no experience getting hardware built, and was probably talking to people who didn’t know how to get good prices in China, so Canonical thought it would cost a lot more to make a custom smartphone. Another fact is that Canonical was paying a big programming team to work on Ubuntu Touch, and Shuttleworth probably did think that he needed that much to pay their salaries. Ubuntu Touch, Unity8, the Mir display server and most of the apps are siloed code developed by Canonical, which is very different from the approach that Purism took when developing Phosh, so Ubuntu Touch cost a lot more to develop. Another big part of the problem was that BQ and Meizu didn’t market the phones to Linux users who could appreciate them and they weren’t really committed to UT and viewed it as an expendable experiment, that they gave up on way too quickly. At least that is how I see it.
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So, basically, Mark tried to crowd fund a competitor to the iPhone?
Considering OpenMoko was around 2007, I am not sure it would have been that difficult to get a phone built. It still would have cost mark a ton on the software side as none of the mobile stacks existed back then … so yeah, maybe a good point.
Perhaps the other difference between Pinephone/Purism and Canonical is that they are a software company and Purism is a hardware company. A software company looks at the problem and their reference point is app stores on generic hardware whereas Purism is a hardware company and their reference point is getting some optimum of hardware design with an absolute minimum of software resources spent to get a product out the door.
It’s interesting to think how narrowly focused the Pinephone and L5 projects are. Pinephone got hardware out first and the L5 is just a bit more polish above that to get it to be a daily for a niche audience.
Openmoko phones were based on a canceled promotional device that was in development earlier by FIC. That’s where the unusual round shape with a hole came from - Openmoko could do its phones because it inherited molds and some stuff like modems that would go to waste otherwise, driving the costs and risks down a lot. The first phone that would use a fully custom-made design, GTA03/3D7K, has never reached production.
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I did use one of the BQ Aquarius tablets and it was the worst linux experience in my life. That thing was useless. By comparison the L5 has a matured software compared to that ubuntu tablet.
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