Librem 5 phone hands on—Open source phone shows the cost of being different - Ars Technica

• The Librem 5. This is the home screen, I guess? It is just totally blank.

  Ron Amadeo

• The back. It's all plastic.

  Ron Amadeo

• Did we mention the Lbrem 5 is extra-thick? Just look at the USB-C port compared to the rest of the body.

  Ron Amadeo

• The Librem 5 is about twice as thick as a normal smartphone.

  Ron Amadeo

• There's a headphone jack, and it sits rather deep in the body of the device.

  Ron Amadeo

• The side volume and power buttons.

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• The back pops off, and you can take out the battery.

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• The battery.

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• The case is crazy looking. It's 3D printed? Maybe?

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• The MicroSD slot.

  Ron Amadeo

It is hard to do something truly different in the smartphone industry. Companies, especially smaller companies, are all working from the same parts bin with the same manufacturing partners. You take your Qualcomm SoC, your Samsung display, and your Sony camera sensor—and you take a flight to China and visit Foxconn, which, in addition to manufacturing, will even do engineering for you if you want. Smartphones are so samey because they have an established, for-hire supply chain that has a certain way of doing things, and it's much cheaper, faster, and easier if you just "go with the flow" and do what everyone else is doing.

Big companies like Samsung and Apple have enough money, control, and connections to move the supply chain in whatever direction they want. In terms of smaller companies though, there is a single one trying to blaze its own path: Purism, the maker of open source Linux laptops, is building the Librem 5 smartphone. Not only is the OS open source and based on GNU/Linux—not Android—the hardware is open source, too. The core components have open source firmware, and there are even public hardware schematics. This is as close as you're going to get to a totally open source smartphone.

If you haven't noticed, open source smartphone hardware is not a thing that existed before now. There have been phones that run open source builds of Android, or other Linux phones like the PinePhone, but those are full of closed-source firmware from non-open components. The usual hardware companies cautiously guard their hardware designs and drivers, and Purism's hardline stance on open source has ruled out almost the entire established smartphone supply chain. As the company writes in a blog post, "When we first approached hardware manufacturers almost two years ago with this project most of them instantly said 'No, sorry, impossible, we can not help you'." Others warned us, that it could never work, that it was too complicated, 'the industry does not do that,' and so forth."

What followed was a long and winding road, but after two years of work, Purism is finally shipping the Librem 5 smartphones to customers. We were able to spend a few days with a device, and it's definitely one of the most unusual smartphones in recent memory.

The thing to keep in mind here is that Purism has taken on an absolutely gargantuan task. It somehow scraped together a new supply chain of mostly open source components, it came up with a smartphone design from scratch, and it is building its own smartphone distribution of Linux. Two years is not enough time to do this. The OS and app package is not nearly finished, and it lacks basic smartphone functionality. The hardware is nearly finished, but you'll have a hard time taking advantage of it right now since the power management isn't really implemented, and support for things like the cameras are non-existent. If you really want open source smartphones to be a thing, though, this is where you need to start. The Librem 5 is a proof of concept.

The hardware: open source at any cost

"Open source at any cost" really feels like the mantra the Librem 5 was made with. That cost is going to be significant, since 1) the need to go out and build its own supply chain means Purism is doing this with zero economies of scale, and 2) the company needs funding to build the OS. Get ready for some sticker shock: the Librem 5 is currently $750. That's up from the $700 early-bird price it had in 2019, and when the "Evergreen" 1.0 version launches, the price will go up again to $800. This is high-end smartphone money—and remember, you're not really buying a finished product. The Librem 5 is only for true believers in the idea of an open source smartphone.

About that "Evergreen" name. Purism has been pumping out the Librem 5 in iterative batches that continually try to improve the manufacturing process, but even the earliest units go up for sale. There has already been "Aspen" and "Birch" batches, and we spent most of our time with a "Chestnut" model, which is version 3 in the iterative manufacturing process. After this, there will be a batch called "Dogwood," and then the most important version, "Evergreen," which is a mass-production-ready "version 1.0" model. Purism even has a "Fir" version planned with a second-gen CPU planned some time later.

With none of the normal component vendors willing to participate in an open source smartphone, the spec sheet looks very strange. The SoC is an NXP i.MX 8M Quad at 1.5GHz. No one would call this a fast or modern smartphone SoC. It's a four-core Cortex A53-based chip built on a 28nm process, which is about equal to a high-end smartphone from 2013 or 2014. Purism couldn't find an open source provider for the cellular modem or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth cards, so those components each sit on socketed M.2 slots, making the inside of the phone look something like a laptop, with removable cards.

The SoC isn't really a smartphone part ether: the i.MX 8M Quad is originally meant for "Automotive" and "Industrial" uses, and it has a much larger form factor than a typical smartphone chip. The package size is 17 x 17mm, about twice the size of a Snapdragon chip, which is usually around 8.5 x 8.5mm. In addition, smartphone chips usually have the flash memory stacked on top of the SoC—the Librem 5 needs more board space for this, too. All these non-smartphone parts mean the Librem 5 is extra thick: 16mm, or about the size of two high-end smartphones stacked on top of each other.

Other specs include a low-end 5.7-inch 1440 × 720 IPS LCD, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and, for now, a 2,000mAh battery. Purism says that, when Evergreen launches, the battery will be upgraded to 3,500mAh. The hardware is consumer-friendly, with an easily removable battery, a headphone jack, and a MicroSD card.

Besides the two connectivity cards, the only other non-open source component is a firmware blob that is part of the i.MX 8's RAM initialization process. RAM is kind of important, so the best Purism could do is quarantine this code and run it on a secondary M4 processor that is part of the i.MX 8. This allows the main A53 cores to only run open source code. A lot of effort was put into this idea of quarantining proprietary code on the Librem 5. The whole reason the Wi-Fi and cellular cards live on M.2 slots is so they can be locked behind two of the three hardware kill switches, which can turn off these two cards along with the Microphone/Camera.

• I'm doing my best iFixit impersonation here.

  Ron Amadeo

• Whoa! Look at the inside of this thing. It's like it's made out of laptop parts.

  Ron Amadeo

• Here it is with the cards out. These M.2 slots do not belong in a smartphone.

  Ron Amadeo

• Left is the cellular card, right is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

  Ron Amadeo

• Here you can see glue on the earpiece and some squishing into the camera opening.

  Ron Amadeo

• Let's talk about the sloppy screen glue job on this

  Ron Amadeo

• This side has the these three hardware kill switches, but they're unlabeled. Notice how the back case doesn't attach correctly to the back of the phone.

  Ron Amadeo

From a distance, this Chestnut model isn't terrible. It's a solid-feeling, plastic-backed smartphone with an old-school smartphone design thanks probably to the peel-off plastic back and the absolute brick of a body. Look closer and you'll see that the Librem 5 does not have the usual fit and finish from a seasoned Chinese smartphone builder, though, and there's no shortage of nits to pick. There are uneven glue blobs that have squished out from around the display. The earpiece speaker has some of the display glue on it. The front camera is off-center, and there is uneven, visible glue around that, too. One section of the removable back doesn't connect to the case correctly, so the seam is uneven.

The most frustrating part of the Librem 5 right now is easily the power management, which isn't nearly complete. The phone is dead nearly all the time, because so many basic charging features we normally take for granted don't work. First, the phone doesn't seem like it has any kind of idle power mode. It is hot from the minute you power on until the battery dies, even with the screen off. You can't leave the phone on the charger overnight to charge it—you'll wake up to a dead phone. I think what is happening is that there's no trickle charge, so the phone charges to full, then stops charging, then the battery dies.

It is hard to diagnose anything that is going on because the charging indicator does not work. The battery percentage doesn't change, the phone will say it's charging when it's unplugged, or it will say it's not charging when it's plugged in. The battery state seems to get queried at boot-up and then never again. Another diagnosis problem is that, even when the phone is charged, it doesn't reliably turn on. Lots of times, the power button does nothing, and it takes one or two battery pulls to get the phone to turn on. So every time I want to use it, I need to play the game of "is the battery dead, or is the power on process being erratic?" To top off all these issues, you can't run the phone off the charger when it's at zero percent. You have to plug the phone in and give it a half-hour or so of charging before it will turn on.

All of these basic power problems make the Librem 5 a hassle to use. The battery is constantly dead and the phone is never ready for me when I want to use it. It requires babysitting just to charge and keep charged. My solution so far has been to either plan when I want to use the phone and plug it in an hour beforehand or, at some random point in the day, plug it in, set a timer for an hour or so, and then unplug the phone and pull the battery, just so it doesn't drain to zero.

The good news is that Purism knows the power management isn't done, and there's plenty of room for improvement. The company is working on it.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo

The software: also not finished

• This is the primary interface, featuring an app drawer at the bottom and a list of running app thumbnails that are always blank.

  Ron Amadeo

• Here's a low-brightness display mode,

  Ron Amadeo

• Oh no, my "Laptop" battery is critically low.

  Ron Amadeo

• The Web browser.

  Ron Amadeo

• A sort of quick-settings panel you can pull down from the top. This never shows notifications.

  Ron Amadeo

• The keyboard!

  Ron Amadeo

• Here are the beginnings of an app store. For now, this is just the "GNOME Software" package manager, and most of the apps aren't meant for mobile.

  Ron Amadeo

• Ron Amadeo

• Desktop linux apps will install, but most of the graphical apps won't work.

  Ron Amadeo

• Sudo apt-get install Chromium!

  Ron Amadeo

• Holy crap, that actually worked! Chrome won't launch or anything, but APT is fully functional.

  Ron Amadeo

• The default apps get updated through the package manage.

  Ron Amadeo

• So does the OS.

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• The About screen.

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• The settings.

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• Contacts.

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• The phone app, which actually works.

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• The boot-up lockscreen.

  Ron Amadeo

Rather than run Android—like everything on Earth that isn't an iPhone—the Librem 5's "PureOS" is literally desktop Linux. The Librem 5 runs the Gnome desktop environment (wait, do we still call this a "desktop" environment?) with the goal of ushering in an age of "convergence between the desktop / laptop and the phone." Apps written for a desktop can run on mobile with only a few changes, and apps written for mobile should run on a desktop without any problems. Purism has been working with the Gnome community to upstream many of these changes required for the Librem 5, and for some apps, like the Gnome Web browser, shrinking them down on a desktop will actually trigger on the smartphone UI! Purism seems to be using Gnome desktop apps wherever possible. Besides the Web browser, the text editor is gedit, and the contacts app is Gnome Contacts.

The OS is in an extremely early state right now. Some of the basics work, and some do not. You can make phone calls, and you can receive text messages, but you can't start a new conversation with a contact. There's a desktop, of sorts, but it's always blank, and I don't think there's a way to add app icons to it yet. You can open an app drawer and see icons and recent apps, but none of the recent app thumbnails works. The app store is a mobile port of Gnome Software. It works—it's able to update packed-in applications and distribute OS updates, but the app collection isn't curated for the phone yet, so most of the apps don't run or aren't appropriate for a touch screen. There's no way to access the camera.

While most of the smartphone stuff isn't done yet, the real power of this being actual Linux is already apparent. You easily open a terminal, punch in "sudo apt-get install [app name]" and you'll install an actual desktop Linux app. I spotted Chromium in the default repository and it actually installed, complete with an app icon. It wouldn't launch though, since the desktop version of Chromium isn't built for a tiny screen like this. Command-line programs work fine though.

By the time the Evergreen hardware launches, Purism hopes to have a lot more of the basics down, with phone calls, text messages, Web browser, and updating software set as particular focuses. Right now, the Web browser seems the most complete, and it can easily whisk you around the Web.

I wonder about the approach Purism took with the Librem 5. The company chose to do everything all at once by building a new smartphone OS and a new hardware supply chain. For a customer receiving a Librem 5 today, you're getting an unfinished operating system and rough, gen-one open source hardware. That's a bunch of compromises to accept for $750. A more reserved approach would have been to build an open source, GNU/Linux-based OS on closed source hardware first and then made the difficult jump to custom hardware when the OS was in a more complete state.

Purism is a company though. It needs funding to keep going with a project like this, and that means selling hardware. When asked why the phone is so expensive compared to something like the $150 PinePhone, Purism CEO Todd Weaver cited ongoing software development as a big cost. He said:

We're not just putting out hardware. We have an entire investment in the software stack... We're doing kernel development, operating systems, applications, we wrote the entire phone shell, we wrote libhand which is a library to port existing applications over, so it's an entire ecosystem play, it's a platform play, as opposed to just putting out a piece of hardware.

Purism's "ecosystem play" is going to need time to get up and running, so, for now, just consider this article a status update. The company has a long way to go to produce a competitive smartphone, but for an idea that started as a crowdsourced project two years ago, Purism has made an incredible amount of progress.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/

2020-01-24 11:45:00Z
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