I’m relieved that we are getting a 13MP rear camera. I had resigned myself to buying a separate camera, but I might be able to get by with just the Librem 5.
As I noted in another post, NXP hasn’t documented its MIPI CSI-2 interface for cameras very well, so I’m glad that Purism has found a solution.
I wonder if the Librem 5 will use the On Semiconductors AR1335 sensor, because E-con Systems figured out how to make that sensor work with the i.MX 8M in its e-CAM130_iMX8 add-in module. Another possibility is the Omnivision OV13855, because it is probably close to the Omnivision OV5640 reference camera module which NXP provides for the i.MX 8M.
I would have been much happier with 64GB of Flash and 4GB of RAM. 3GB of RAM is fine for a phone, but not so great if using the Librem 5 as a PC with an external monitor. Oh well, the i.MX 8M Quad processor doesn’t have enough horsepower in the 4x Cortex-A53 cores to be a very good desktop processor either (although the Vivante GC7000Lite GPU is pretty good), so I doubt that I will use Librem 5 that much for convergence. The one question I have is whether there will be enough RAM to run an Android emulator like Anbox inside PureOS in the Librem 5.
The big question about convergence which still hasn’t been answered is what is the maximum screen resolution and refresh rate that the Librem 5 will support for external monitors and whether DisplayPort Alt Mode and/or HDMI Alt Mode will be supported.
Given that the price is rising $100 from its original price and we didn’t get any extra Flash or RAM, I’m guessing that Purism has been constrained economically in trying to cover its development costs. I really hope that the Librem 5 receives a huge number of orders after it is released to quickly recover those costs. A lot of orders will also help Purism finance a version 2 with more RAM and Flash.
Of course, it sucks to be an earlier adopter, since we don’t get the best hardware, but I will be tickled pink just to have a phone that can run a Linux terminal and doesn’t need any binary blobs in the kernel.