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.
That’s not quite right. The actual question there was how many work on PureOS for the phone, and if try to count 20 devs on the team page, it becomes clear they can’t all be dedicated to the phone. The new, (phone specific) faces seem to be ~15, needing to be fed by the campaign money.
Also, remember that there is a continuous money inflow. At the end of the campaign we were at about 3000 devices ordered, with an average of at least 3 devices sold per day in the months after. So my conservative estimation was that this could have doubled to 6000 phones by June.
However, Todd said in that episode that shipping the devkits led to an unexpected wave of orders. I also did not factor in the effect of recent marketing efforts.
I hope there is one
So maybe they are actually closer to 10,000 pre-orders by now? I would sure hope so.
Nice . We are going to be a pretty small community it looks like . But I feel it will be a very enthusiastic development community . The brotherhood of the Librem 5 . Almost feels like a secret most of the normies just cant grasp !
Having phones like the Librem 5 is incredibly important for activists, reporters, dissidents, etc. (I have given a couple classes to activists about how to remain anonymous online, not because I’m expert, but just because I happened to show up at a meeting and people started asking me questions about security.)
My hope is that once Purism and PINE64 show that there is a market and we get a couple thousand apps that work on Linux phones, then other manufactures will decide to also start making Linux mobile devices. It starts with companies like Fairphone and Gemini, then it moves onto companies like Archos, Clevo, Acer and ASUS, that have history of being willing to work with Linux until it finally hits the mainstream and Linux becomes a viable third mobile OS.
However, even if mobile Linux never reaches more than 1% of the market, it will still have an effect, because it will tell Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc, that people have an alternative, so they better not abuse their power too much, because people have the ability to switch.
Going from 720 to 1080 would cause significant battery drain. We are talking 15-20 % for moderate to heavy users (high SOT).
We could see that in some devices which switched it year over year.
And considering that this phone already comes with not so power efficient processor (compared to Qualcomm or Huawei’s Kirins) , we can’t afford any extra unnecessary hits on the battery.
I really hope they stick w 720. I had it on my Galaxy Nexus, GS3 and OG Moto X and 0 complaints for the “sharpness”.
It’s a big market. Over 1 billion units annually. 1% of that is a lot of phones. I would think that that is more than enough to sustain a sub-market for Linux / open source / freedom phones. To me that is a credible alternative but neither credible nor alternative is unambiguously defined.
Note that annual smartphone sales have for the first time stopped growing, so I have been conservative with the above claim.
1.5552670 billion smartphones were sold last year according to Gartner, so 1% would be 15.5 million phones. If Purism ever got to that level, it would be outselling Sony, HTC and Google. Even capturing just 0.001% of the market or 15,500 phones per year will probably be a sustainable business for Purism. To be able to start influencing the industry, however, Purism & PINE64 probably need to capture 0.01% of the market or 155,000 phones per year.
