Still no reports here of anyone having received the latest dogwood?
I’m keen to hear from someone, anyone?!
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Didn’t Purism say they actually started shipping last week?
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I don’t understand. You have to hand the phone back? You’re not an actual customer but are a reviewer?
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I assume that someone in the postmarketOS community loaned Dogwood to Clayton Craft for a couple days, because Craft is a postmarketOS developer who is working on porting postmarketOS to the Librem 5 and he needed to do some tests to see if his port works on Dogwood.
If you want to know for sure what is the situation, ask Craft on Mastadon.
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From the photo, it looks like the individual pixels will be noticeable with a 720x1440 screen. I usually don’t notice the boundaries between pixels on a 1080p screen, and I never see them on a 1440p screen.
Sadly, the i.MX 8M’s MIPI-DSI interface only supports a maximum resolution of 1080x1920 at 60Hz, so Purism was forced to either give us a 9:16 1080p screen or a 9:18 720p screen. It is much more work for the GPU to render 2,073,600 pixels every frame in 1080x1920 than 1,036,800 pixels every frame in 720x1440. I have to assume that Purism chose the 720p screen because it would allow a faster interface, a cooler GPU, better battery life and a longer screen that avoids big bezels at that top and bottom of the phone.
I would rather have a higher resolution screen than a longer screen, but the battery life is the deciding factor for me.
NXP still hasn’t released its datasheet on the i.MX 8M Plus, so I don’t know if its MIPI DSI supports 9:18 1080p, but I doubt it since its GPU is less powerful than the i.MX 8M Quad. On the other hand, the Plus has an extra LVDS interface, so maybe it supports a higher resolution screen.
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Someone from Purism did say that they were going to ship Digwood that same day and then they never went back to say anything later to let us think anything differently after that. So by now, Dogwood has already shipped or Purism has not been truthful to us.
Yes, this is the reason for my post. I would have thought that US customers would have it by now.
Maybe any day now.
Ah, the cycle continues. Every batch release is met with impatience and suspicion. Somebody always appears on here or reddit with one eventually (although reddit tends to burn them out, to the surprise of no one, I’m sure). Have a little faith.
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I am so anxious to get my hands on my Lebrem 5 . Ordered in Jan. 2018 and the waiting suspense has been kinda cool. Bought a UBports Pinephone and haven’t fired it up yet. Just ordered a PostmarketOS with 3gb ram 32 gb emmc. That I will probably fire up. And when the Librem Fir comes out I’m getting one of those too. I’m 67 and didn’t think I’d ever get away from Apple/Google but now I am so happy these Linux phones are coming out!
I run Mint 20 on my NUC and that is very forgiving for a computer illiterate like myself. And you forum folks keep me excited for the arrival of L5 . GodI I can’t wait. Just like Christmas when I was a kid.
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What you wrote is very beautiful. I am about ten years younger than you and I have been using linux since 1995 but I too expect the Librem like a child. It is good to keep the child within us.
Best regards
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We got first a Birch unit and soon a dogwood unit to this Developer for this work with PostmarketOS and the Librem 5.
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The screen has a polarization filter which can sometimes make it look bad on the photos. Those sure aren’t individual pixels, they are way too big for that 
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Yes as customers got back to us with address confirmations and the 2nd confirmation that they did indeed want Dogwood we started shipping them out. Whether those folks decide to post about it I suppose is up to them, however we have sent out a unit for review as well, since we can’t guarantee customers will write about it.
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Thanks Kyle for explaining that to me.
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Thanks Kyle, Are you allowed to tell us how many Dogwoods Purism intends to ship? I know you don’t owe us those numbers. I think we would all like to see Purism have fantastic success and we’re all hoping the numbers are big or at least not small.
That depends on the nature of the I2C problem. If it requires a further hardware change then I would be hoping that Dogwood is small. Ah, the fun of developing a new phone from scratch. Just musing publicly. I don’t speak for Purism.
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I know you cannot reveal batch size, can you at least let us know the percentage of Dogwood customers that gave 2nd confirmation for receiving it despite the issue?
If percentage is low, it will explain the lack of posts by such customers.
I don’t think that many people realize how hard it is to develop a new phone from scratch without a reference design from the SoC maker. Even a company like PINE64, which has a lot of experience in hardware design and has been working on A64 boards since 2015, has had problems producing its PinePhone. Data over USB-C didn’t work in its BraveHeart and CE: UBports editions. The 4000-4500 customers who bought the CE:UBports are stuck with phones that they can only fix by doing some delicate soldering. The A64 should support RAM running at 667MHz, but people report that it suffers crashes above 588MHz. The A64 should support 1.2GHz, but the PinePhone’s max speed is limited to 1.152GHz.
When Android phone makers buy a reference design for the Snapdragon, MediaTek Helio or UNISOC, they are unlikely to face any of these problems, because Qualcomm, MediaTek and UNISOC have already debugged their reference designs. Essentially, they bypass the need for the pre-Aspen, Aspen, Birch and Chestnut boards and they start at Dogwood with most everything already working. They certainly don’t have to figure out how to rewire the board to get DisplayPort instead of HDMI output, because all of today’s mobile SoC’s already have DisplayPort in the reference phone design.
They don’t have to help develop the drivers, so all the hard problems that Purism is facing with the DCSS video out, suspend-to-RAM and MIPI-CSI2 interfaces for cameras are already solved. They also don’t have to create the mobile desktop environment (DE) and adapt the source code of dozens of applications to use that DE.
This is why I get so annoyed at the reviews for both the Librem 5 and PinePhone, because most of the reviewers haven’t even bothered to look at the state of the mainline Linux drivers for the i.MX 8M and A64, so they have no clue about what the challenges are. They certainly haven’t bothered to think about why having 5 separate chips at 40-28nm node size might have a different kind of battery life than one integrated mobile SoC at 14-7nm.
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You are right, we aren’t reporting batch sizes for the pre-Evergreen batches other than to say they are small (it makes little sense to have large batches pre-mass-production).
While we still haven’t heard back from all the Dogwood backers (those who don’t get back to us within a reasonable time will end up in the front of the line of Evergreen), so far of those who have gotten back to us a large majority opted to go to Evergreen, after we informed them about the stability issue we were working on.
While we are still working on tracking down the cause, our mitigation seems to be working well, at least for me. I haven’t had a crash ever since it was put in place.
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