Just found out about this phone being developed. Was searching to upgrade Samsung S5.
I’m on the fence about preordering though because screen resolution is still not defined. The dev kits apparently have 720p which in my opinion is low and hard to read as letter become blurry, especially since console will be available and most Linux users spend their time in command console.
I find that at 1080p I don’t require glasses anymore while 720p I still have to use them.
Is the screen still being decided upon, or there’s concrete decision on what it will be?
Well, @antpanlinux, he already knew about the dev kit specs…
However, @Alex_Leo, yes those are also the final dimensions, as confirmed here for example. (On that page, don’t be confused by 360x720, that is a compatibility value for software developers, that is then doubled for HiDPI displays).
I currently have a Galaxy S3 Neo with 1280x720, so with 1440x720 I’ll get 115,000 extra pixels.
Keep in mind that the readability of a display is not only defined by the pixel count. The display itself is bigger than on the Galaxy S5. I don’t think you’ll have a problem.
Another factor is the font size. I’m pretty sure you’d be able to tweak it to your liking. Hey, it’s Linux after all! But I also expect them to have reasonable defaults.
I have a tablet I never use any more because it had (for its day) a very high pixel density and most apps wouldn’t let you adjust the font size, so I could never read, say, place names on the maps–the lettering was maybe 2 mm tall.
I personally look forward to fixing some of my pet peeves about the apps that come with phones (e.g., the audio player not displaying the album name in full screen and having no option for it); for that of course I’ll need the source code…
Oh,
The s5 has bigger pixel density, 1920x1080 on 5" which is 432PPI. Makes reading easy because text is crisp and not blurry, has nothing to do with display size.
The upcoming screen size, it is 1440x720 on 5.7" so it makes about 282 PPI, which is a bit less screen density.
But thanks @Caliga. I’ll probably wait for reviews then.
@SteveC I thought android had font size selection in settings. Might be recent thing though
@Alex_Leo
It’s quite possible that tablet had the font size selection. It was quite some time ago, so either I didn’t have it, I couldn’t find it, or I COULD find it and the app simply ignored the setting (grrr). I just don’t remember which.
Sorry for being blunt, but screen size matters a lot for when reading text and you are very wrong.
Have you problems reading text on a laptop? 1080p is a great resolution for a 13" screen and that would only be 169PPI which is almost half the PPI.
However, you are correct with saying that going from 432PPI to 282PPI is a downgrade especially considering that text is smaller on a phone, but it’s still a good PPI. Just for some other reference, the iPhone 4 to 8 and XR all have 326PPI which I never had heard anyone complain about text rendering on and the 282PPI is not that far away from that. Apple considers a “Retina” display to be 300PPI or higher, so the Librem 5 is very close to that.
I am happy that Librem 5 does not have a unnecessarily high resolution screen (which seems to be the trend nowadays) since a lower resolution means longer battery life which is more important IMO.
But even with that in mind, if you have bad vision and even people with good vision barely can see a difference wouldn’t a bigger screen be more important than higher resolution? (assuming that you can increase the font size)
1440x720 is More than enough.
I have a Huawei P20 and i run it on low resolution(1496x720) to save battery. Still the text is crispy clear. I’ve tried to see if i could tell the difference, but i really cant.
Anything higher than 720p on a mobile phone is a waste of pixels and CPU/GPU cycles IMO.
Like others say, a higher pixel count would be a battery drain.
That said, my monitor screen is 1920x1080 22in and it has only 100 PPI, yet the text is good more than enough. I would prefer 1440p for the monitor, but more than that would be pointless for such a small screen. Same goes with a smartphone screen, i don’t think we need 1080p. Today we have smarphones with 2160p screens which are oveoverkill.
Having watched/read every interview with Todd Weaver that I can find, it is clear to me that his heart is in the right place, but Purism undertook one of the hardest engineering tasks possible, and it has taken longer than Purism expected.
Purism has about 20 employees working on the Librem 5 (I can’t remember which interview I saw that number in). There is a big difference in the cost of paying 20 people for 24 months vs paying them for 15 months which was the original timeline, which means that Purism now has a much smaller budget to give us better hardware (RAM, Flash memory, camera, higher screen resolution, etc).
Of course, I would love to have a 1080p screen, 8GB RAM and 256GB Flash memory that Weaver mentioned in that interview, but Purism set its hardware specs very low in its crowdfunding campaign so that it had more room to operate if it went over-budget, and it probably will need to give us the lower specs to make the economics work in version 1.
Once Purism has recovered its development costs, we are probably going to see higher spec versions of the Librem 5 in the future.
Maybe I’m a little weird but I get a lot of vicarious enjoyment out of helping to finance Purism’s development work. It has been fun to watch the project evolve and to be able to see new code be added to the repo and download the schematics of the Dev Kit and open them in KiCAD. Maybe I’ve gotten $599 worth of enjoyment out of the process.
