The Purism Librem 5, the first attempt at a Linux phone in a long time, is ready to leave the factory. Purism The phone, up close. It's got an app drawer, complete with stock Debian icons. Purism The phone, half assembled. Purism Get a load of these crazy internals. M.2 slots?! That many chips? This is unlike any other smartphone on the market. Purism I put a few labels on the components. Purism / Ron Amadeo The official render of the Librem 5. Purism Let's look at the OS. Here's the lock screen. Purism Entering a PIN. Purism This seems to be an app drawer/recent apps combo screen. The open apps don't generate thumbnails yet. Purism It has a Web browser! Purism Texting with a touch keyboard. Purism This looks like the usual mobile quick settings/control center pulldown. Purism The PureOS app store. Purism A screenshot from the dev kit. Tired of an app store on your phone? Sudo apt install works just fine. Purism
Purism, the maker of a line of built-for-Linux laptops, is now shipping a built-for-Linux smartphone. The company announced this week that the Librem 5 smartphone is now shipping to early backers of the crowdsourced, $699 smartphone project.
The Librem 5 is unlike anything else on the market. Not only is it one of the only smartphones on Earth that doesn't ship with Android, a fork of Android, or iOS—Purism's commitment to 100% open software, with no binary blobs, puts severe restrictions on what hardware it can use. Android's core might be open source, but it was always built for wide adoption above all else, with provisions for manufacturers to include as much proprietary code as they want. Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question.
Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted.
The Librem 5 spec sheet, then, is full of unfamiliar companies—the only ones willing to share their code for an open source smartphone. Powering everything is an SoC from NXP: a 1.5GHz i.MX 8M Quad. This chip is four Cortex A53 cores built on a 28nm process. If you're looking for a rough Qualcomm equivalent, you'll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of Qualcomm's lineup to find the Qualcomm (not even Snapdragon branded) 215, a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex A53 chip also built on a 28nm process.
In other words, nearly any phone you buy today will have a more powerful, more power-efficient CPU than the Librem 5—even $160 Android phones are now packing eight-core SoCs built on more power-efficient manufacturing processes. That $700 price Purism is asking (more than a OnePlus 7 Pro!) is the price you pay for a niche smartphone with none of the economies of scale you get with normal smartphone parts.
The I.MX 8M is not an SoC meant to live in a smartphone. NXP's "target applications" for the i.MX 8 only lists "Automotive" and "Industrial" uses. And sure enough, the SoC shown in Purism's pictures is way bigger than the usual smartphone packaging—it looks like something that would be more at home on a laptop motherboard.
The lack of smartphone considerations also means there aren't as many features integrated into the SoC as usual, resulting in all of the following extra parts. Cellular connectivity runs off the separate M.2 LTE card, which is listed on Purism's site as a "Gemalto PLS8 3G/4G modem" (the prototype pictures, though, show a BroadMobi BM818). Purism actually couldn't find an open provider for the cellular modem, so the best it could do was isolate it from the rest of the system in an M.2 slot.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth requires another separate card from Redpine Signal, which supports 802.11 abgn 2.4 GHz/5GHz and Bluetooth 4. GPS is also a separate chip—the Teseo LIV3F GNSS—which gets soldered to the motherboard. On normal smartphones, the flash storage is mounted on top of the SoC, in a "package on package" configuration.
But that won't work with the Librem 5's industrial-grade SoC. So that's another chip that needs to find a spot on the sizable motherboard. The plethora of extra chips and laptop-style parts do not bode well for the device's power consumption. The size of this phone is also not clear—Purism does not list dimensions.
At 3500mAh, the battery is on the small side. But it is, at least, "user replaceable." It's unclear if "user replaceable" means "with a screwdriver" or by just popping off the back for a mid-day swap, but Purism's description that the battery is "non-soldered" and "easily serviceable" sounds more like the screwdriver option. Other specs include a 5.7-inch 1440×720 (2Read More – Source
