New Post: Librem 5 4500mAh Battery Upgrade

Mass produced Librem 5 phones will ship with a 4500mAh battery!
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-4500mah-battery-upgrade/

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hehe I am sad with my Chestnut version and the ~2000mah battery

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Just curious if it’s possible to turn off the screen and still have apps (like music playing) continue? Hoping that helps with battery charge. Thanks and great news!

14 hrs was about my minimum to say it scrapes in as good enough for its purpose. I can now travel to work, work, and travel back home.

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We knew when we pre-ordered our Librem 5, that we wanted to use the hardware kill switches. If we use the kill switches as planned, it looks like a side benefit will be longer battery life. Why eat up valuable battery power screaming to the world “hey, here I am. Come spy on me”? No, we want to be invisible as much as possible. That’s good for battery life. If we can get in the habit of plugging the phone in to charge while at your desk or in your car for part of the day, maybe the daily battery life will be comfortably adequate. If the battery life on the L5 is as good as shown in the graphs, but the rest of the phone is good, I’ll give Purism a total pass on the low battery life.

It looks like my expectations are increasing, the more Purism achieves. At one time I said I would be happy if the L5 could only provide a bash prompt and make phone calls. We’ve got to give Purism a break here if everything isn’t perfect. They’re performing miracles as it is. After over a year of waiting, maybe I’ll be happy if they ship anything to me at all (just having fun with it here). If our expectations are too high, nothing will be good enough. Despite some good reports, I plan to lower my expectations and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised with what I receive.

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does anyone know which batch actually gets this improved battery?

Evergreen as it is next.

Batches previous to Evergreen cannot upgrade the battery because of different size.

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sus. I’ll believe it when they ship it.

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I’m guessing this will add about 7g more to the battery, plus the weight of 3 mm more of case. I’m guessing that the final weight will be about 250g. This won’t be a light phone.

I’m ok with that. You can’t pickpocket a brick, and it can double as a club.

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It looks like they were able to lower the power draw too. Using the battery life from the Dogwood announcement post and the fact that it had a 3500 mAh battery, Evergreen should have had a ~12.5-12.9 hr standby time if it had the same power draw as Dogwood with a 4500 mAh battery.

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It a wasn’t lightest to begin with, so 7g isn’t that much weight but the increase in battery mAh is huge for that weight in comparison. 25% more.

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that’s a lot of battery. i don’t doubt that in time the software optimizations will make a huge difference in regards to the capacity and make the phone last longer while screen is ON. just look at the fund-your-app page. i wonder when all the 10k votes will be close to finished what the market says about battery life expectations.

so far it’s 4,286 / 10,000 Votes Goal < 42%

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I think my calculation was wrong. I looked at the fact that Dogwood only weighed 10g more than Chestnut, but added 1600 mAh more, so I figured 160 mAh per gram. However, Dogwood also added an metal sheet with thermal paste and an internal plastic cover with extra screws, so Purism probably figured out how to lighten other things in the phone to compensate for what it added.

Here is a better way to calculate it. The Dogwood battery weighs 63 g with 3600 mAh, so it has 57 mAh per gram. Part of that is packaging, so let’s say 60 mAh per gram in the additional 900 mAh, so the Evergreen battery should be 15 g heavier. Then, there is the extra 3 mm of length in Evergreen’s case, so let’s guesstimate 3 g extra in the case, which means a total weight of 258 g for Evergreen.

Today’s typical smartphone weighs around 180 g, so the Librem 5 will be 78 grams more or 43% heavier. I suspect that the fact that it is 15.5 mm thick, which is double the thickness of a normal phone, will bother people more than the extra weight.

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In the video associated with this announcement it was said that disabling things with the hardware kill switches is another great way to increase battery life, but I’m curious if those things can be turned off in software, and be off.

I like the hardware kill switches but I don’t want to use them all the time, and thus wear them out. To me the kill switches are for specific situations and not for routine daily use.

If I kill wifi in Gnome settings, is the module still drawing power?

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Or the opposite question: if I don’t kill WiFi in settings, is the module still drawing power?

The point is that WiFi client modules by design have power save modes, which can be used if they aren’t doing much, but which may have to be enabled in software. (The module will definitely be drawing some power but that can be dramatically less than what it would draw if power save mode were not enabled.)

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The (new) Zenfone 7Pro comes in at 230g and 9.6mm thickness. It has a 6.67" screen and 5000mAh though. Never the less, I got accustomed fairly quick so this won’t be an issue for me.

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Yes, same way as traveling with only 15 mph is also a good way of saving fuel.

No, bad analogy. Going slow is like throttling CPU. Switching off Wifi is more like not towing a camper behind you - you don’t always need it. That is common sense, part of L5’s security features that you are encouraged to use and also what should be done with SW switches now anyway.

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