The BM818 has a built in GNSS, but Nicole Faerber told us on another thread that Purism wouldn’t connect the antenna to the cellular modem’s GNSS, so we don’t have to worry about it.
The Teseo LIV3F GNSS is can be turned off by turning off all three hardware kill switches at the same time.
With the physical buttons you can have:
Wi-Fi on, GNSS on, cellular modem on
Wi-Fi on, GNSS on, cellular modem off
Wi-Fi off, GNSS on, cellular modem on
Wi-Fi off, GNSS off, cellular modem off
The combination that I want most of the time will be:
Wi-Fi off, GNSS off, cellular modem on
but the only way to get that is to turn off the GNSS with software which sends commands over the I2C bus (or by physically disconnecting the antenna).
There are some reviewers like Anandtech that take the time to understand the hardware that they review, but most reviewers are lazy and they will see “4x Cortex-A53” in the A64 and i.MX 8M Quad and decide that they are the same.
They won’t realize that the A64 is 20% (0.3GHz) slower, because it is built on a 40nm node, whereas the i.MX 8M uses a 28nm node. The Mali-400 MP2 in the A64 is an outdated GPU from 2008. They won’t realize that the A64 only supports up to 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and is 32 bit for everything outside its CPU cores, whereas the i.MX 8M supports up to 8GB LPDDR4 RAM and is a true 64 bit SoC.
These differences are important because the i.MX 8M provides Purism with an upgrade path for version 2, with more RAM and a better camera and a 14nm node, whereas PINE64 is stuck with a maximum of 3GB of RAM and a 5MP camera and no upgrading because Allwinner hasn’t provided any information to the Linux community on the A80 and isn’t a Linux-friendly company like NXP.
PINE64 is basically stuck, because it has no upgrade path. It will probably have to switch to Rockchip RK3588 or NXP i.MX 8M in any future phones. I’m really happy that we will have economical Linux phones from PINE64, but I’m worried that the company is locked into a low-quality SoC for the next 5 years, and we really need mobile Linux to take off at both the high end of the market where Purism operates and at the low end where PINE64 operates.
I was wondering that . in the future will we have the option to upgrade to a better board seeing this phones modular nature ? And why do you think purism didnt max out the board they already decided on ?
It is possible that someone will take the GPL 3.0+ schematics and produce the same circuit board with more RAM and Flash memory. I would love to see that.
It is pretty clear to me that Purism went over-budget in creating the Librem 5. They originally planned for 16 months of development costs after the crowd funding campaign started, but it will be 24 months if they release in September, which is why the price has been raised by $100 and they didn’t give us better specs.
What I think happened was that Todd Weaver wanted to give us a high-spec phone which is obvious from his interview two weeks before the crowd funding campaign started. Then, Purism did the numbers and decided to be very conservative with the specs, when it launched the campaign, because it knew that all sorts of delays and cost overruns could happen.
Unlike most Silicon Valley startups, Purism isn’t willing to go to a venture capital firm and ask for money, because it could be forced to compromise its principals, so it has to self-finance its development, which means that we have to pay higher prices and get lower specs on version 1 of the phone. Once Purism recovers its development costs, however, I expect that v2 will offer 8GB RAM and 256 or 512GB Flash.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a Snapdragon 425 may have the same CPU cores and the same node size as the i.MX 8M Quad, but it only costs around $10-$12 in large quantities, whereas Purism is probably paying over $150 in components to get the same functionality as a Snapdragon 425. The i.MX 8M Quad costs $20 in large quantities and the Gemalto PLS8 on M.2 card probably costs $35, plus $5 for the M.2 slot. Then add in the ST Teseo GNSS, Redpine Signals 80.112n+Bluetooth, USB 3.0 Host/Power Delivery chip with fast charging and probably a chip to convert the video to DisplayPort or HDMI Alt Mode as well, which is all included by default in the Snapdragon 425. If we want a fast camera, then Purism will have to add a separate DSP or ISP, since the i.MX 8M doesn’t include that either (which is why the camera will probably be slow). Then, add in the Smartcard reader and a circuit board that is twice as large as in a normal phone. It is not surprising to me that the only way that Purism can make it all work was to cut down on the RAM, Flash and give us a low-resolution screen.
There is no indication that this is it.
On the contrary, at the time they were rather purely technical constraints.
The processor considered was i.MX6, which only supports 3GB of RAM.
For the screen resolution, this is explained by the gpu capabilities and power consumption of the SoC.
And so on and so forth.
For comparison, an iPhone XR from 2018 is 3GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory.
It cannot be said that the Librem5 was designed with low spec option.
Fair point on the i.MX 6, but 32 GB of Flash was considered a low amount of memory in 2017 for a $600 phone and that isn’t limited by the i.MX 6 processor. Within a few months after launching the campaign, Purism knew that it would use the i.MX 8M and its specs were listed as “RAM: 3 GB minimum (subject to change)” until recently, so Purism was considering providing more RAM, and decided against it. That indicates to me that Purism is economically constrained. Also, the GC7000Lite GPU can handle a 1080p screen.
I think 720 will be plenty for a 5.7 inch screen Anything more sounds like overkill to me. I’d rather Purism puts the money into software and services than for more pixels on the screen.
I generally agree that high resolution doesn’t matter that much (although I notice the difference when I compare 1440p and 720p screens next to each other). The more important difference in my opinion is how bright a phone can get in the sunlight, and cheaper LCD screens are generally hard to use when outdoors.
I just went phone shopping to help my girlfriend decide what phone to buy. We ended up with a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 that costs $175 with:
6.3" screen, 1080x2340 IPS LCD, 479 nits, 1338:1 contrast ratio
48/5 MP front camera, PDAF
13 MP back camera
4000 mAh battery
Android 9 (and can run LineageOS 16.0)
I value freedom and digital rights far more than specs and benchmarks, but when my girlfriend asked how her new phone compared to the Librem 5, I had to tell her, “Well, the CPU on your new phone is about 4 times more powerful than mine, it has twice as much storage, 25% more RAM, 4 times more resolution in the camera, and it is 1/4 the price of my phone.”
Then, she asked, “Why are you paying so much for a phone that isn’t that good?”
In response, I launched into a long explanation about why more processing power doesn’t matter after a certain point, and why a Linux phone will consume less RAM and processing cycles than an Android phone, and why digital rights are so important to the future of humanity, and how governments and corporations can use our information to spy on us and repress our civil liberties, and why Google and Apple are evil, how I’m helping to finance the development of an alternative mobile OS, why a Linux phone is better for the environment because it will be supported forever, etc.
Then she asked me sweetly, “So when you need to take a photo, you are going to want to use my phone?”
Then you asked her sweetly, “So when you need to communicate with someone privately, without being surveilled by X Corporation or Y government, you are going to want to use my phone?”
The iPhone 4, which introduced the “Retina Display,” had a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. I have enjoyed crisp, pixel free text since 2010. The Librem 5 will have 282. A slight step back, but hopefully still high enough to hide pixelation. The iPhone 3 had 163, so at least it will still be better than that.
Linux had high DPI capability years before the retina display (such as KDE), but there where some applications that did not. Maybe this will give some Linux applications time to update, if they have not already.
Hopefully our support for Librem 5 version 1 means that there will be a better version 2 in the future.
In another thread, someone posted a video that mentions that the screen will be like the Nintendo Switch, and that device has a good screen. This part of the discussion starts at 10:40 into the video:
Anything more sounds like overkill to me. I’d rather Purism puts the money into software and services than for more pixels on the screen.