Hello, I am a phone collector and I have been reading about the Librem for many months. Being a phone with a high price, I must choose very well when to buy the phone, since I have never spent so much money on a telephone. I want the Librem 5 that I buy to be the final version.
Will a Librem 5 v2 come out? Or v3? A Librem 6 or 10 ? When?
What is your opinion?
I welcome you - and anybody else - to take part in a poll on that at https://forums.puri.sm/t/poll-will-l5-arrive-in-november-or/
About the versioning and terms, those need to be right first, so we talk of the same thing. As I see it, Aspen, Birch, Chestnut and Dogwood were the test versions and Evergreen is the final production version (no more hardware changes needed). Then there is the talk about Fir, which is considered “v2”, and that is at this point only speculation - many are of the mind that it’s not so much a next version as it is a new model, since a lot is expected to change (a lot has been learnt from creating the L5). Soo… probably only time will tell which versions are final and which are collectable - and which are usable.
And I think L10 would be a tablet or laptop, since the number seems to refer to screen size on Purism products. If that interests you, then I have good news: there is already a final L15 that you can get… 
Obviously, on the after-market. Just before it becomes an antique, when most users think it’s junk.
Just try and buy an HP3000, they’re dirt cheap if about 25 years old. But older than that the price starts going up again as antiques. (And they’ve never had a virus outside the lab.)
Although it’s probabably different on the cell phone market, anything over 4 years old is considered junk. After that… everyone is jealous of my wife’s old Droid with a slider!
i’ll hold onto my bb-q10 even AFTER i get my L5 … only for inspiration if nothing else
Hi @LibremOnly5
if you don’t need the money now and you want to collect a version of the librem 5 in the end I would recommend you to buy now.
Why?
As for the numbers the 5 stands for the size in inches and not the version. Librem 13,14,15 e.g. are Laptops with bigger screen sizes.
You might also consider buying a Librem 5 USA, which might be a real collector piece - however it also comes with a higher price.
In terms of buying a collectors item, you should buy a Birch batch, since it was rumored (by Jay Little on r/Purism) that there were only 70 of them. Someone offered one on eBay a while back. The Chestnut and Dogwood batches were also very small. If you want full functionality, order now and get Evergreen. (You save $50 by ordering now.) If you want a balance between functionality and value as a collector’s item, ask if anyone is willing to sell you their Dogwood.
At this point, I don’t expect Fir until Q4 2021 at the earliest, but 2022 is more likely. It will have better battery life, but worse graphics performance and worse video out. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#what-will-be-the-changes-in-the-fir-batch-and-should-i-wait-for-it
As a phone collector, you might want to check out my database of mobile phone innovations.
Awesome FAQ page! I see it is about two weeks old, which explains why I haven’t seen it before. I’ll be sure to share this every time I see someone ask about Fir from now on
It is an impressive job. Thank you very much for the valuable information. My congratulations.
I read that post few weeks ago. Super bummed. Especially, that one of the main reasons I asked for refund last autumn was failure to move me to that batch from Evergreen. I figured better pay full price (not 600) eventually for a better phone which can be my daily driver. According to all of this , not worth the time or money. So, instead of anxiously waiting for the phone shipment in a few months, I’m left with nothing 
I really hope , they switch to a different CPU&GPU for the second version.
I wish that NXP had simply added two Cortex-A73 cores to the Quad and shrunk it to 14nm, but NXP decided to make the Plus a whole new chip for a different market. Purism doesn’t really have much of a choice, but to use the i.MX 8M Plus in the next version, because there aren’t any good options on the horizon and it does need better battery life to make the Librem 5 a good smartphone.
The RK3588 at 8nm looks like it will be a great chip, but first we have to see if it can boot with free software and whether the Lima driver can be adapted to work on the new Mali “Natt” GPU. At any rate, it will probably take a couple years to get good mainline Linux support. Otherwise, I don’t see a single decent chip on the horizon that Purism can use.
I think for the majority of people, Fir will be a better smartphone than Evergreen because it solves the central problem of limited battery life. For the people that need the better GPU and VPU in Evergreen, they can probably pick up an old Evergreen for cheaper after Fir is released.
My Q10 sadly died on me in July, just couldn’t have held on until November when the L5 arrives.
Just to put things in perspective and to get a grip on the consequences of implementing the I.MX 8M, knowing both Evergreen and Fir aren’t even in production/optimized:
What would be the differences when A/B i.MX 8M Plus in the L5 Fir compared to already newer, faster, and more power efficient i.MX8 (where i.MX6 was planned).
From an average consumer point of view, what would practically really stand out when comparing these for daily driver usage (bit of browsing, email, taking a few pictures)?
The big difference for most people is that Fir will be more energy efficient, but it isn’t clear how much of a difference this will make because the i.MX 8M Plus hasn’t yet been produced or benchmarked and there is no documentation on its power consumption.
In theory, Fir should be faster at shooting photos/video than Evergreen, but we don’t know when the Hantro H1/H2 hardware video encoders and image signal processor in the Plus will be supported with a free driver. Without those, the Plus will be limited to software encoding, which probably means 1080p@30 max video just like Evergreen.
When GTK 4 is released with the ability to use graphics acceleration from the GPU, the interface of Evergreen will speed up more than the interface of Fir, because of the more powerful GPU in Evergreen. It is anybody’s guess when GTK 4 will come and Phosh will be adapted to use it.
We don’t know if the GPU clock in the Plus will be clocked higher than 1.0 GHz to counterbalance its weaker hardware.
Given all the unknowns, it is hard to answer simple questions. I’d guesstimate that Fir will be 10%-15% faster than Evergreen in CPU performance, but 50% slower in GPU performance. The important question for most people is how much more energy efficient with Fir be, and a lot depends on the software support for power management. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#how-long-will-be-the-battery-life-of-the-librem-5-evergreen
to me 2021-2022 seems really FAR away … why wait 2 years from now for a lil’ more battery life and some uncertainty numbers ? i might decide to switch to full Evergreen in my order and hope i can invest more in Fir later down the road (GOD willing)
You should order your Librem 5 right away. I ma guessing that it might start shipping in early 2021. I have confidence that it will eventually ship. But Purism isn’t exactly known for meeting projected schedules. But Purism is doing miracles and no one else in the world is doing what they’re doing. So I give them a pass on being late. When Evergreen does start shipping, many people will start posting about their happiness with the L5 publicly. Then those who have been skeptical up until then will want one. The demand is likely to skyrocket at that point. If your order isn’t placed before the demand skyrockets, you’ll be in the queue a long time before your phone ships. Maybe I am wrong that Evergreen will start shipping in 2021. If Evergreen starts shipping in November, the demand could skyrocket before the end if this year. Even if the demand doesn’t skyrocket, the queue is likely to be very big now because the phone has been in pre-order status for years now. Any way you look at it, you want to place your order right away. No matter what, you’ll be waiting for it for quite some time unless you can buy a used one. I ordered my L5 fifteen months ago and am planning to wait up to maybe another six months or more even now to receive it. If it comes earlier, that will be a pleasant surprise. But if you order today, you’ll still be in line quite a way behind me. There are others quite a way ahead of me in line. But if you wait to get in line until the queue is gone, you might be forced to accept a different product and it might not ship until years from now. So if you can, place your order today.
has Fir been announced officially by Purism or is that an imaginary queue line until 2021 ?
Several people on the forum have reported that they are in the Fir queue, and they have received emails from Purism confirming that. However, Purism hasn’t said a word about Fir since its original announcement of the different production batches on 2019-09-05.
This isn’t surprising, since NXP hasn’t even started producing the i.MX 8M Plus and hasn’t released any documentation, so all Purism can do is wait.
i’ve been one of those people for more than 2 years now … but seeing what the prognosis is for Fir i’m not impressed at all … Evergreen is looking more attractive because even if the battery isn’t going to last as long as Fir i’m more interested in the convergence aspect …
The final version, is when they get to the letter “Z” I would think.
(Ba dum bump, … rimshot.)
I wonder what the tree is for that?
you can always have za, zb, zd… and so on.
I hope there will never be a final version of Librem 5. What would my grand-grand children use otherwise?