Librem 5 Phone, progress reports

trainailleur · 22 Feb 2019, 12:36

@libremax said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

@trainailleur IMHO, it means that if one switch is turn off then GPS is also turn off.

I believe that is probably the case, but they should have worded it completely unambiguously. If that is what they mean, it will axe the utility of the kill switches for many use cases.

trainailleur · 22 Feb 2019, 20:52

@trainailleur said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

Purism said:

3 - WiFi, Cellular, Microphone/Cameras (all 3 will turn off GPS)

Does this mean the GPS will be available to hardware unless all three of the kills switches are off, or does it mean that GPS cannot be used unless wifi and cell modem and camera are all switched to available?

I asked for clarification and will post it here if I receive it.

Purism replied: if all three kill switches are engaged, GPS will be disabled in hardware.

trainailleur · 25 Feb 2019, 01:41

I noticed today that the baseband was announced as the Gemalto PLS8. It is good that Purism will keep the modem user replaceable on a card, because the LTE coverage of each version looks from this product sheet to be fairly basic.

PLS8-E: Has GSM modem. LTE Bands 1, 3, and 7, three of the four primary bands in most of Europe, Band 8, the "global" band, and Band 20, a common secondary band in much of Europe. No band usable on a US Big 4 network.
PLS8-US: Has GSM modem.
Not much in the way of LTE bands for international roaming outside of the Americas.
AT&T - Band 17, giving partial coverage on the AT&T primary bands 12 and 17 (the former is a superset of the latter, but exactly what this means in terms of reduced coverage for not having Band 12, I am not sure), Bands 2, 4, and 5, three of AT&T's 7(?) secondary bands.
T-Mobile US - Bands 2 and 4, two of T-Mobile's four primary bands, and Band 5, one of T-Mobile's two secondary bands.
Verizon (I would guess mainly through roaming agreements with another carrier) - Bands 2, 4, and 5, all secondary Verizon bands which might be useful if other carriers have roaming agreements.
PLS8-J: No GSM modem. LTE bands 1, 3, and 19. From what I can tell (as no expert), these are decent bands for LTE in Japan.
PLS8-X: Has GSM modem. LTE bands 2, 4, 5, 13, and 17. These seem like good bands for Latin American and the Caribbean, and should also work on AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, but I'm not sure if there's much application in the rest of the world.
PLS8-V: "V" presumably for Verizon - No GSM modem. LTE Band 13, Verizon primary band, and Bands 2 and 4, two of Verizon's four secondary bands.

Perhaps there are some other varieties of this modem which aren't listed on the spec sheet, but I'm not seeing much in the way of coverage for Africa or most of Asia among these five. Maybe Purism will choose a different modem for those markets.

Edited to add GSM info and clarity on the Verizon coverage.

libremax · 12 Mar 2019, 11:06

Librem5, how to disable sensors and other hardware that could be used for tracking and spying: Lockdown Mode: Beyond Hardware Kill Switches

trainailleur · 18 Apr 2019, 14:50

Purism posted a few videos yesterday of bootup, calls, and browsing, and SMS on the Librem 5:

Purism’s Librem 5 Progress in Videos

trainailleur · 24 Apr 2019, 18:50

April Progress Update – Librem 5 Hardware

tera · 2 May 2019, 18:16

Fyi as it is related: Purism launch Librem One ethical services crowdfunding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19789381

What are your thoughts?

divideandsponsor · 2 May 2019, 18:16

@tera Purism needs to make these applications available for Ubuntu Touch. You guys are supposed to be partners, but I see very little collaboration. what gives?

TotalSonic · 3 May 2019, 02:04

@divideandsponsor said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

@tera Purism needs to make these applications available for Ubuntu Touch. You guys are supposed to be partners, but I see very little collaboration. what gives?

What gives is that UBports has yet to receive the 2 Librem 5 dev boards that Purism said they were going to send. So until dev boards are actually received work can not proceed from the UBports developers. Hopefully that will change sooner than later.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

kalle.kruse · 5 May 2019, 16:57

Reply from Purism regarding the Librem 5 dev kits for UBports:

If you are in contact with the UBports developers then can you ask them to get in touch directly via an existing Purism contact? If you are a UBports developer then can you talk to your colleagues and find out what the status is from their perspectives?

My impression is that there are a very small number of development boards, but that most of them are already assigned to third party development groups. For some of those groups, the task of assigning the boards was left to the people in charge of those groups and I don’t know whether there was clarity about who should receive boards.

trainailleur · 8 May 2019, 17:25

May Progress Update – Librem 5 Hardware

guru · 9 May 2019, 09:23

I read the May update (as all other updates as well) ... interesting that it seems that they make a mobile version of the MUA Geary which I tested already on my FreeBSD laptop. In general, I think that we're far away from any delivery to us, the backers.

trainailleur · 30 May 2019, 16:24

Librem 5 – End of May Progress

trainailleur · 6 May 2019, 20:57

Librem 5 vs Android — Which boots faster?

The tl;dw is that the Librem 5 booted in 13 seconds including PIN entry, and the Android phone in about 45 seconds. Of note, they used an 6 year old, carrier-crippled Android phone (Verizon HTC One) for their comparison, somewhat damning their own cause.

For further comparison, I just timed these phones, with PIN unless otherwise indicated:

Iphone 7 (3 years old) running IOS 12.3 w/encryption (file encryption, as I understand it): 18 seconds
Pixel 3a (just released) running stock Pie w/file encryption: 16 seconds without PIN (not set up yet), probably about 19 seconds with.
1st gen. Pixel (3 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Pie w/file encryption: 29 seconds
OnePlus One (6 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Pie, no encryption: 28 seconds without PIN, probably about 31 seconds with.
OnePlus One (6 years old) running OTA9, no encryption: 35 seconds with password instead of PIN, probably about 32 seconds with a PIN instead.
Nexus 5 (6.5 years old) running OTA 9, no encryption: 48 seconds
Nexus 5 (6.5 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Oreo, with "full disk" (actually only data partition) encryption: 66 seconds

The 3a is a mid-range phone. The Pixel and Iphone 7 were flagships of their day. The OpO and Nexus 5 were upper midrange phones.

I don't know if PureOS is running with any sort of encryption in this test. From the video it would appear that if they are, they are using some form of file-based encryption.

Hard to draw any firm conclusions except that the comparison was severely stacked to make the Librem five look as competitive as possible. It wouldn't sound as impressive to say that it beat a three year old Iphone by five seconds.

kugiigi · 6 Jun 2019, 06:03

To be fair the specs of Librem 5 is not that great right? but that's still a bad comparison that shouldn't have happened

arubislander · 6 Jun 2019, 05:59

I am struggling to even see the relevance of this comparison. How often do users boot their iPhones? How often do Purism expect it will be necessary to boot the Librem 5?

hummlbach · 6 Jun 2019, 06:30

And further more: You can boot Linux in 300ms. If you give it 1 second you also get a simple GUI... so you have to look very closely here what you get for these 13 seconds... for example which services are running and which not... maybe android also preloads some apps during boot to speed up app launch? I don't know any details neither for the librem5 (maybe they have already started all the services like for calender/contacts, location... but I doubt it) nor for android (maybe @dobey can shed some light), just wanted to say that these figures can be misleading easily.

A Former User · 6 Jun 2019, 06:46

@arubislander Well since you ask, I boot up every morning... but 12 seconds or a minute doesn't really make much difference in reality.

dobey · 6 Jun 2019, 14:19

@hummlbach Not sure what you expect I could shed some light on here.

trainailleur · 6 Jun 2019, 14:56

@kugiigi said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

To be fair the specs of Librem 5 is not that great right? but that's still a bad comparison that shouldn't have happened

My thoughts exactly. Not too bad a result, but absurd test. It would have been better to show that the boot time was comparable to a modern phone, which it is.

Of note, the test appears to have been done by Bryan Lunduke, who can be a bit of a showman.

@arubislander said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

I am struggling to even see the relevance of this comparison. How often do users boot their iPhones? How often do Purism expect it will be necessary to boot the Librem 5?

I tend to agree with you and @3arn0wl about the irrelevance. After all, it's not like it's a ten minute server boot either way. Still though, I do appreciate the fast reboots of the Iphone on those rare occasions when I have to do it, and I'm looking forward to the same on the Pixel 3a when I get around to degoogling and microgifying it. It also may matter to some for other reasons:

Notwithstanding the presence of the kill switches, the set of users to whom the Librem 5 appeals might have significant overlap with the set of users who prefer to keep a phone turned off when not in use. From what we have seen so far of the user experience and what we can expect of the app ecosystem at launch, those making heavy use of existing platforms may chafe at the compromises of Phosh. "Leave the phone off most of the time" users already making minimal use of a smartphone might get by just fine, and those users will be booting a lot.

Also, do we know if the phone version of PureOS is using a ro root like Ubuntu Touch and Android? If it instead uses the rw root of a typical Debian system, then perhaps it will also see typical Debian frequent kernel increments and need to be rebooted more often.

@hummlbach said in Librem 5 Phone, progress reports:

so you have to look very closely here what you get for these 13 seconds... for example which services are running and which not... just wanted to say that these figures can be misleading easily.

Very true. While boot time is slightly faster than a three-year-old Iphone or a contemporary midrange Android (and I suspect comparable to a current Iphone or a current Android flagship), given what we know so far of the rather minimal environment of PureOS/Phosh, it seems improbable that it's doing as much in that boot time.

Still, going back to what @kugiigi said, this is on hardware that's quite weak by today's standards.