Howdy,
So we decided to take a bit of a vacation, and decided that the only electronic device I would take with me was a librem 5. Here’s my experiences:
One thing worth noting before continuing is that I’ve mainly used the librem 5 as a phone, and text tool day to day, so the big change here was accessing internet and other things. It’s also worth noting that before this, I would have not brought a phone at all on travel (didn’t have one), and would use a laptop only for electronic devices (and usually it stayed in the hotel room).
The Good:
4G internet was really fast. I guess because I was in a more populous area than where I live, but the 4G seemed just as responsive for browsing as my laptop at home. (4G at home is really slow, and often takes minutes to load a page)
Getting use to epiphany, I really grew to like it. It took me awhile to figure out how to do tabs and bookmarks.
I found the todo application really useful for doing things like writing down my family’s order (to let them go elsewhere while I bought food).
Location tracking without the gps worked a lot better in the more populous area. It was able to find where I was within about 30 feet of where I was standing every time I looked. (didn’t try any navigation though, as I was skeptical it would work well)
The Bad:
Several times when I pulled out my phone, I found it wouldn’t turn the screen on. I had to hold down the power button until it powered off, and booted it up again. Didn’t look at logs, but this was really annoying.
The phone really needs a lock or something on the minimize button on the bottom when typing. I keep accidentally hitting that when trying to type something (like when searching the web)
When browsing the web while charging it, I found that it actually loses charge when doing that… (using stock charger)
Annoyances
Attempting to bookmark npr.org, and edit the name of the bookmark causes epiphany to crash. My guess is it’s the extra long name that’s the cause?
General use things I learned
wifi works considerably better when using the 2.4Ghz bands (I was using 5Ghz before and the damn thing only really got a signal when in the same room as the wifi router!). Learned this as I was surprised that I got a good signal on the hotel wireless, and decided to investigate further when I got home.
Edit: I am a bit curious how other people use a phone while on travel. What things they feel a phone needs (aside from the obvious navigation).
From what I understand, 5Ghz doesn’t travel as far or through walls as well as 2.4Ghz. It can be improved by increasing the transmit power, if your router has such a setting.
As for travel, my main uses for a phone are:
SMS/MMS (…and maybe a phone call or two)
Maps/Navigation
Email
Camera
Internet, to briefly check transport schedules, verify addresses of restaurants, museums, hotels, etc.
Occasional use of specific commercial apps (airline, hotel, etc.)
VPN service, to protect my browsing over public/hotel WiFi.
This all requires a modem and SIM card that will work in the region of the world I travel to, when going overseas. (I don’t like to rely on WiFi alone.)
At the same time, that button is convenient for when it is intentionally used i.e. to push the keyboard aside and get more screen real estate for display. Needs consideration.
Sadly I didn’t take particularly good notes on battery life, but did not bring a battery pack.
It did fully discharge once when arriving home. I don’t remember when I unplugged it or if it had switches on or off. It was likely around 8 hours when I looked at it to charge, but I can’t say for certain. Likely left the wifi and cell modems on, but I don’t remember.
I was pretty religious about any time we got back to the hotel to charge the phone.
When you say it wouldn’t turn the screen on, are you sure the phone was powered on at that moment? I mean, could it be that it had powered itself off earlier?
Reminds me of HF vs VHF. You can get HF depending on the skip zone of the continent you’re on. You can get VHF ground propagation depending on the weather and maybe bouncing off a cloud.
This has been bugging me for a while. Out of the box, I configured my Librem 5 to use the 5 GHz band - but the signal range was not very good e.g. no signal where I had my charger, which was a pain. I could have put in a second WAP but …
Spurred on by your post, I changed my Librem 5 to use the 2.4 GHz band instead. Not only can I now get signal where I have my charger but it looks like time-on-battery has increased too. Not dramatically but enough to be helpful.
Glad you found it helpfull! Yeah I was having that same exact issue. I was using a dell ethernet/power thing so it could be backed up and get updates while charging.
The sad thing is with the Librem 5 is knowing that it’s the first mass produced version, I’m expecting problems that may not be fixed until later hardware versions. Thus things like this are sometimes assumed to be that sort of issue without realizing there is a fix.
The good news is that so far I’ve seen no real examples of that. Yes, there are lots of gaps in the software. (Maybe there’s some weird stuff with USB bus speed. I can live with that.)
(I was using a dock that does not have an ethernet port so was using a USB-to-ethernet dongle plugged in to the dock, which is another solution.)
I can’t see a way to directly specify the frequency on the phone. (At least, not in the GUI.) Do you have your Wi-Fi configured so that it uses a separate SSID / network name for each frequency band?
My Wi-Fi is configured so that the same SSID is used for both 5GHz and 2.4GHz. This works well for my laptop. The Librem 5 does have worse 5GHz reception than my laptop, but the main issue I get is that it takes too long to switch to 2.4GHz when the 5GHz signal strength has decreased, such as when I walk into the living room. I usually find it quicker to go into the settings and manually disconnect and reconnect to the Wi-Fi network, rather than wait for it to go over to 2.4GHz of its own accord. (At least, I presume this is due to the 5GHz signal strength. I never actually checked which frequency it was using.)
Oddly, it is currently sitting about 60cm from the Wi-Fi AP, which is where it was when I last rebooted it, and it’s telling me it’s put itself onto 2.4GHz, even though it should have perfect 5GHz signal here. This is actually great, because it means it won’t have issues switching from 5GHz to 2.4GHz, but I’ve no idea why it’s done it.
My wifi is setup with separate SSIDs for each. Told the librem 5 to connect to the 2.4Ghz one, and it stays on it. I don’t think it will try to switch on it’s own unless it loses signal.
Yes, I do. I do that for ease of management so that I can easily know and control what is using what (I have lots of SSIDs and lots of devices).
If you choose to advertise the same SSID on both bands, which is perfectly valid, then I’m sure there would be some way of controlling which band is used on the client side (e.g. at its simplest disable 5 GHz on the client side) but I don’t know what the incantation is. Maybe use nmcli to look at 802-11-wireless.band ?
Adding: If you directly edit the xyz.nmconnection file, you may be able to add band= in the [wifi] section but I don’t know what syntax you need for the value. Also, if you edit such a file, you will either need to reload or reboot.
