I am wondering what the differences are between dogwood and evergreen, despite the battery life. Does Dogwood have the same functionality as the evergreen mass produced model?
I’ve noted that the battery capacity is 3600mah for the dogwood, yet the evergreen has a battery capacity of 4500mah. If I were to buy a replacement for a dogwood model, would the one currently for sale on the site be compatible with it? If not, where would I find a replacement?
What country are you in?
Good question though.
Purism said that they made the case 3mm longer in Evergreen to improve the cellular reception. Versions 1.0.3.1 and 1.0.6.1 of Evergreen moved some components on the main board to improve the GNSS reception. If those things matter to you, then you probably want the latest Evergreen.
For more info on the versions, see:
If you want a detailed list of the changes in each version, see the first page of the schematics.
The Evergreen battery has larger dimensions than the Dogwood battery, so you can’t buy the Evergreen battery and put it inside Dogwood. Your only hope of getting a replacement is to contact Purism and ask if they have any to sell you or buying a used Dogwood to get its battery.
Let’s say that I dissasemble the phone and saw down the battery chassis so the dimensions of the evergreen battery could theoretically fit. Would this have any impact on the phone, as the battery capacity will be different? Would it even boot, even if I didn’t damage any components?
I found the battery model on Ali Express (BPP-L502), but even so it just doesn’t make sense for these devices to be dependent on proprietary battery models compared to what the Pinephone does. Even so, modding the chassis would be cool.
I’m not sure whether cutting out the plastic housing around the battery will give you enough space inside Dogwood to use the Evergreen battery, but it might work, since the Dogwood and Evergreen batteries look like they should have similar output. Maybe @ekuzmenko or @nicole.faerber has some insight on this matter.
I’d like to see Purism use a standard-sized battery from another phone, like PINE64 did with the PinePhone, but I doubt that Purism could find an existing battery on the market that had the dimensions that Evergreen needed. Because the L5 has buttons/switches on both sides of the phone, it can’t use the kind of C or L shaped circuit board that wraps around the battery like most other phones use, and the L5 also needs a very large main board, because it has 2 to 3 times as many components as other smartphones. The six chips that the L5 uses in place of the standard integrated mobile SoC like a Snapdragon takes about 15 times more space on a circuit board, plus you need extra space on the board for M.2 connectors and hardware kill switches. The end result was a very thick battery to fit in the remaining space.