Questions about Dogwood and phone calls

It happens. It’s no big issue at all.

I’m not sure why, there aren’t that many people on the forum so you’re talking a small percentage of total purchases. It’s also been clear that only a small percentage of phones have been shipped so that would be a small percent of a small percent.

On top of that I expect a decent percentage of people whom purchased a Librem 5 won’t be posting about it publicly as that’s normally a small percentage of people that do that, most of them are generally bloggers/influencers/have some ties to the company.

So 2 people that aren’t in some way associated with purism/journalism is a pretty reasonable number given that I would expect it to be a low percentage of people posting of the low percentage of phones shipped.

A small percentage thrice over once you take into account the issues they warned of in the lead up to shipping the batch. We have, one person comparing two different phones they have in passing, and me, a person that went out of their way to try and bring some peace of mind to others. Expecting anyone to go out of their way out of a group that is likely a few dozon people at best is… The anxiety talking? I know I was freaking out really bad those last few weeks leading up to getting my tracking number. That’s why I’m on here now.

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I put in for first come first serve Spring of last year. Later, I was informed of the batch I would be getting. I think it will be Evergreen (my memory is going hazy, roll again).

I freaked out last December because of all the hardware issues with overheating, shutting down, excessive drain,.signal , etc.
Figured , I want a daily driver and having everything delayed for another year I wanted a Fir instead. Wasn’t able to move choose that and asked for refund, because I needed money for a phone I can enjoy for a long time before Liibrem can truly replace it. I just didn’t have 600 for a spare/ extra phone to carry around.
Now, I do regret a little. Though, if evergreen gets ironed out enough for tlmy use case, I would gladly pay that 150-200 extra from original backer price.

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I can make and receive calls on my Dogwood phone. It works quite well when using headphones, but there are some problems:

  • using the speaker phone, the other party hears their voice echoed back after approx. a second
  • sound level is a bit weak
  • Bluetooth headsets only work for sound playback, not for calling
  • I have issues with the proximity sensor leading to lots of spurious touch events when using the phone’s earpiece
  • phone drops to 2G during calls, cutting all internet access
  • I keep forgetting the mic kill switch, because there is no indication in the UI

SMS works, too. Haven’t tried MMS.

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These are my maximum runtime estimates, based on a small number of shorter observations.


Runtime seems slightly longer with a data-only SIM than with a voice-enabled SIM.

Numbers assume that you drain the battery all the way from 100% down to 0%, which is not such a good idea in practice. Getting about 75% seems more reasonable. That’s about 8h idle in shutdown mode, or 3:20 calling with screen off.

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@lipu, Thanks for the graph and your assessment of calling. We have so few people with Dogwood giving their impressions of the phone.

I have this same problem using speaker mode during calls in LineageOS 16.

I wonder if this is a universal problem or a problem specific to your carrier. If you don’t mind me asking, which cellular network provider are you using?

There is not yet software support for MMS. See: Librem5 MMS Question

Do you have any estimates with the screen on?

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This is most likely an issue related with the carrier. I can makes calls with without loosing internet access. In my case it can drop to 2G where there is a bad coverage from my carrier. But even with 3G I can make calls and have internet access

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We should have echo cancellation filters in place soonish. Meanwhile, lowering the volume may help.

There’s no VoLTE, so it drops to 3G when in call. This would mean that there’s no 3G reception where you live, so it makes it drop all the way to 2G (but data should still work, although much slower - unless there’s something wrong carrier side of course).

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I have this issue on my Linux laptop as well.
By default bluetooth headsets will go into the “H2DP” profile which means high quality audio only, but it’s possible to switch it to “HFP” with programs like pavucontrol to get the mic working, but then the sound is atrocious. It’s unfortunately not possible to have H2DP sound with the mic enabled from HFP at the same time.

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@LinuxNew
Maybe you might be interested in this review.

I do :slight_smile:

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Maybe it’s just radiowave harmonics, then it could be the carrier’s problem. Does it go away when you’re in another area?

Or maybe the echo is just NSA’s repeater after they’ve retransmitted your call back to their servers? (Did they forgot to fit a feedback diode?)

[Edit to add comment on delay length.]

Tele2, Sweden. Had no issues with them using other phones.

Ah, forgot about GPRS… But nowadays that would be about the same as no data connection :wink:

Thanks for the explanation. I’ll investigate, but I do doubt there would be no 3G signal.

That’s excellent news! (I didn’t mean to start a support issue in a forum thread, but I guess it’s good more people get to see it anyway.)

The delay is so long, that it doesn’t disturb the conversation the way a short delay does. It’s annoying, for sure, but at least you don’t get interrupted by yourself 100 ms after you started talking :wink:

That terse post left out important information. So, while I think you’re right, in this case it doesn’t help. Switching to HFP/HSP drowns my ears in deafening noise. No conversation can be heard through that. Perhaps not what you referred to, but atrocious describes it well…

BTW, this issue - like so many other - is being worked on. We may be worried about not getting enough official news from the trenches, but Purism are hard at work and things improve.

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I’m a bit busy, but I’ll check in regularly and try to respond to questions. Please be patient :slight_smile:

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Yes, when I said atrocious I didn’t mean “I am an audiophile and it sounds bad” but actually mean that it sounds horrible.

I just found a PR fixing this. There implementation is quite controversial however as it removes a feature (ofono) to be able to easily implement this new feature.

It’s not Purism who has made the PR, but I can see a comment from a Purism employee in the discussion so they do seem to track it at least.

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Anyone with a Dogwood and the new battery and a caliper: can you measure the physical specs of it: height, width, length and placement and size of contacts? Pics? I’m looking at chargers…

Let me add to JF-Ri’s request for Dogwood owners. Please measure the weight and the dimensions of Dogwood.

Chestnut weighed 230g and measured 150 x 75 x 15.5 mm, and I would like to know if anything has changed in Dogwood for the Comparing specs of upcoming Linux phones table.

CC: @lipu, @dos

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I added your cellular provider to the Community Wiki:

Please add info there if you know what bands you have tested.

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