Only time will tell.
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.
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@Some_dude36 In case you haven’t yet received your confirmation email. Would you mind sending an email to support@puri.sm so we can check the status of your order?
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Done . Thank you sir .
I was considering two very different scenarios.
a) you swap the modem after X years in order to avoid obsolescence or to pick up new functionality or for better performance or …
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b) you routinely swap the modem as you move across country borders.
The second scenario sounds unpleasant. You need the right tools to do the job. You have to carry everything with you while travelling (tools, one or more modems, spares for when you lose / break something). Sounds like a recipe for being arrested by Homeland Security or whatever fascist group applies at that border. You can easily cross a lot of borders in Europe. It’s Tuesday so we must be in Belgium.
The first scenario would allow you to outsource the job to someone more expert e.g. take it in to a local phone repair place who already have the tools and experience since they are taking phones apart every day for lamers who have cracked their screen.
I was suggesting that for the second scenario - the international road warrior - perhaps a global-capable modem variant would be a much better solution, when and if such a modem becomes available.
Bottom line: I encouraged deedend to try to order a second modem and to report here whether Purism were accepting of that.
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That’s great. Good for deedend, who wanted to do that.
My comments were speculative, not having the device in my hands yet !
USB Type-C Port:
USB3.0 data Power Delivery (Dual-Role Port) Video out
I am not sure what USB3.0 data means, does this mean only file transfer? For convergence I would need to connect a monitor (video out) additional to a keyboard, mouse and controller via usb. I was expecting to connect all this via a usb-c docking station (as I remember the old spec as USB host) maybe even with ethernet and sound - would the current specification mean that only wireless connections with bluetooth are possible and docking station solutions don’t work?
It means you can connect USB 3.0 devices and USB 2.0 devices, as opposed to just USB 2.0 devices. It’s necessary to state this, because a USB Type C port can sometimes be limited to USB 2.0. Since a Type C port can also carry non-USB protocols (like the video out), it also just makes sense for the sake of completeness to list USB data as one of the supported protocols.
Cool thank you - but it’s not yet stated that the usb 3.0 data can be used at the same time as video out and power delivery right? Or am I just too fussy with that?
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FairPhone did this very well.
I hope they’ll not change too much the design, we payed for what they showed to us.
Well, it’s Linux, not windows 10 that uses almost 2GB of RAM only for the system. 
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ARM architecture is more efficient than x86/64.
I’m pretty sure most people that preordered the Librem5 prefer the ability to change components than having a thin phone. In fact i remember in an interview with the Purism CEO, he said that people told to Purism to not care too much about how thin the phone should be.
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Being honest…I looks a bit like Purism is having a hard time with costs and therefore choosing the cheapest hardware parts possible. As many others already noticed the hardware is entry level, maximum.
As Linux Desktop is (currently) better than a mobile shell. So lets hope convergence is working just fine on 32GB memory and 3GB of RAM.
When I see the specks of the PINPHONE, I see that they use cheaper hardware. For example 2G RAM and 16GB memory. I have not the knowledge to compare it all.
How did you come to that conclusion . If you only use 2 gigs of memory now and you only use 2gigs of memory 20 years down the road … you’re only using 2 gigs of memory period…
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hehe I just checked , my full featured Ubuntu Studio XFCE desktop , chromium with 2 tabs open and system monitor are only using 1.5gb of memory .
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
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I am now using 3.0 GiB of memory on my Kubuntu. Firefox with 5 tabs opened, system monitor, ktorrent, cantata, telegram, latte-dock and quiterss. That’s a plenty of apps running on a x64 CPU, ARM uses even less RAM so i wouldn’t worry having only 3GB on a phone. People in these days say that 8GB of RAM are low for PCs, but i really never used all my 8 GB except when i did it on purpose starting a Java server with minimum 8GB of RAM to see what happens. 
People really worry too much on pretty much everything that seems a li’l outdated.
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