Librem 5 Phone Funded

by mike-cardwell • 9 years ago

364 171 9 years ago

To the moon!

madmax108• 9 years ago

Interesting. Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop? Similar to how Ubuntu phone was in principle.

Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store?

Really interesting, but so many questions unanswered about what I can do with the phone once I buy it.

ocdtrekkie4• 9 years ago

It's super early here, so it's likely they don't know a lot for sure. It's not like they have a working reference phone even yet, they're playing with a system board and getting touch working according to the last post.

I pitched in $20 to support them, but buying a phone I might not get that I wouldn't be able to use for at least a year that may or may not meet my needs at that time was a bit of a stretch for me. Willing to bet there are many others in the same boat there.

ZenoArrow11• 9 years ago

"Does this mean that I can use my phone to install all apps that I can on my laptop?"

Yes. Any Linux app that runs on ARM. Most desktop apps don't have a UI that works well on mobile, and some apps are pretty much a no-go just because of performance, but aside from that you're free to install the software you want.

"Can I apt-get install something in this (assuming debian/ubuntu installed) or have it's own app store?"

Yes, you'll be able to use package managers. The proposed phone aims to support multiple distros, including Debian and Ubuntu if you want to use apt-get. The flagship OS for the device is Pure OS, which currently uses GNOME Software as its app store (I'm guessing they might extend it with the option to install commercial software before launch):

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software

chrisper• 9 years ago

You could try Termux on Android. It's kind of like that but not quite.

sexydefinesher• 9 years ago

These are great news. We are lucky to have purism bring FOSS and privacy to the masses in a pretty package.

s73ver_4• 9 years ago

Good luck to them, but getting the funding is only a third of the battle. Now it remains to see if they can build something that a substantial amount of people will want to use.

kawera• 9 years ago

It will probably be a niche product but, regardless, I'm super happy we have an alternative to the current duopoly.

s73ver_4• 9 years ago

Well, we don't yet. But I do wish them the best of luck in creating one.

MrMember• 9 years ago

That's what's preventing me from buying in this early. I would love to have a phone that's open and runs actual Linux but $600 is a lot of money for a product that doesn't exist yet and has a tentative ship date more than a year out.

foota• 9 years ago

Seems like really low funding for what they're aiming for

platinumrad• 9 years ago

Yeah, I'm somewhat worried about this as well as 1.5 million is not a lot considering that they actually have to ship phones in the end and can't just pour it all into R&D. I'm assuming that they'll be using mostly commodity hardware (i.MX 8M SoC plus Alibaba-tier chassis, lcd, capacitive layer, etc.) but even then they still have to put everything together and create a deliverable product with reasonably workable software, although I expect that they plan on leaning heavily on the KDE/GNOME/Debian communities. Probably going to flip a coin later this week to determine whether I'm going to back this or not.

JonFish85• 9 years ago

$1.5m, and seemingly a team of somewhere between 18 and 27 people, they're going to need more funding. If they're paying $5k/person/mo (assume for now this includes things like taxes and overhead), that's one year's worth of money. On top of this, they have to cover things like FCC certifications, fees for getting manufacturing rolling and all the other fun stuff that comes with shipping physical product.

JepZ3• 9 years ago

Yeah and the project plan for PureOS >II looks interesting too. Lets do everything, at the same time!

Nevertheless, I wish them luck and hope they succeed.

legulere• 9 years ago

How to fund a good user interface and ecosystem when even Microsoft failed at that (see other article also on the top today)

ZenoArrow11• 9 years ago

They don't have to fund that. The idea is to make use of the work of the open-source community. The main contribution, software-wise will be pushing forward Matrix, pushing forward open drivers, and designing a platform that makes it easier for others to build apps.

Plasma Mobile is one example of an existing open-source project that aligns with their goals:

https://plasma-mobile.org/

Ubuntu Touch (now maintained by UBports) is another good option:

https://ubports.com/

mattnewport2• 9 years ago

Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI. Lack of an app ecosystem was probably Windows Phone's biggest problem. I think a possible solution to that for Purism (I was an early backer of this campaign) is to focus on web apps. I know I'm not alone in being thoroughly sick of everything about apps and app stores.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 9 years ago

If they have even partial support for QT and GTK they can just use existing desktop apps. Clunky, but it helps.

bitmapbrother2• 9 years ago

Windows Phone had a good use interface, many people (including me) prefer it to the horror that is Android UI

You were definitely in the minority. The one common link between Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone was that hideous and universally rejected tile interface abomination. It was so vile and user hostile that Microsoft had to eventually hide it behind a button in Windows 10.

paxy2• 9 years ago

Looking through their website I'm curious why what they're aiming for can't be accomplished with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) or a fork of it, rather than trying to build yet another smartphone ecosystem from scratch?

subway3• 9 years ago

AOSP still relies on a bunch of hacked together BSPs with nasty binary blobs and never-ever-gonna-get-mainlined device specific kernel patches.

scintill76• 9 years ago

They could release open-source and mainlined versions of that stuff then. I guess they wouldn't because they probably consider Android incompatible with their other goals.

paxy2• 9 years ago

Random BSPs don't matter considering they're releasing their own hardware, and can support that as much or as little as they want on top of AOSP.

jhasse• 9 years ago

Replicant then: https://www.replicant.us/

bo1024• 9 years ago

A huge point of their approach is the hardware.

diminish• 9 years ago

We really need a phone for hackers no matter how small the market is. I hope that's Librem this time after Neo, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS.

mortenjorck• 9 years ago

It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't.

The only possibility I can imagine is that by leaning into a niche market, embracing low-volume but also the community that goes with it, rather than engaging in a quixotic quest to become a viable competitor to the established duopoly, Librem can become sustainable along the lines of niche laptop manufacturer System76. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, and it would be pretty cool.

ralmidani2• 9 years ago

This. Free Software doesn't need to be ubiquitous or even dominant. Most end-users don't want Free Software right now. As long as the Librem 5 becomes feasible, we can worry about market share later.

lurker123908792• 9 years ago

Canonical and Mozilla are too busy virtue signaling and selling their users out for profit.

sjs382• 9 years ago

A "success" for this group might look something like "5k devices sold", compared to a "success" for Canonical or Mozilla being larger, like "5+% of the market" or something similar.

noonespecial• 9 years ago

Every year it gets easier. Barring bizarre regulatory hurdles it seems almost inevitable. With carriers like freedompop coming onto the scene, its starting to get pretty easy to pop a speaker, a mic, and a sim-slot onto a raspi and having a "phone".

romaniv• 9 years ago

It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't.

How many people worked on Xerox Alto? They had to do everything from scratch, including bootstrapping their own tools and they had far worse computing capabilities/hardware available to them at the time.

j453• 9 years ago

Respectfully, success isn't about technical ability alone in the mobile, timing is a big factor.

Palm's webOS is an html/js based mobile phone OS that predated the JS based excitement.

For example, if there was a device that focused on running progressive web apps well, there would be a market today than compared to the past when horsepower wasn't at the level it is at now.

The flip side is also being able to run these sorts of operating systems on more devices.

I use my phone more and more for computer replacement tasks on Android. Would be neat to be able to run the odd android app in a container, etc.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

Success in this case means having a choice to buy such device and run a free OS on it.

Arathorn5• 9 years ago

If the goals are relatively modest (e.g. a low bar of selling ~10K handsets), and the project is well scoped (e.g. don't try to be a me-too Android & iOS alternative, but focus purely on secure communication & web browsing), and if it builds on the better bits of FOSS that came from previous projects (Maemo, Meego, Sailfish, FFOS, Ubuntu Touch, etc)... I think this one stands a chance. (disclaimer: I'm working on the Matrix side of it).

flukus• 9 years ago

It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't.

For one thing, it looks like they are leaving much of the development up to the wider community. Gnome/Plasma will handle the UI for instance. Mozilla and Canonical tried to experiment to much with the interface and build too much of it from scratch. Even MS was to "innovative", the had all the parts in place to build a better android but they wanted to put tiles in.

digi_owl• 9 years ago

I dunno about Canonical, but i suspect Mozilla would have had better luck had their aimed their products towards other markets than they did.

s73ver_4• 9 years ago

Do we? I mean, a netbook isn't that big, and it doesn't have the added requirement of always needing to work as a primary communications device.

milcron4• 9 years ago

I think what they mean is "We really need a [primary communications device] for hackers." A netbook isn't suitable for that.

ColanR• 9 years ago

One of these is what I'd go for. Build the phone out of a raspberry pi.

https://hackaday.io/project/19035-zerophone-a-raspberry-pi-s...

http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartph...

jononor2• 9 years ago

Why? The RPi isn't anywhere close to open hardware? Might as well use a devkit straight out of China...

ksrm• 9 years ago

You will never be able to build an acceptable phone with the Raspberry Pi's SoC. It just doesn't have the required power management functionality.

Tepix• 9 years ago

Great news!

I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS.

ZenoArrow11• 9 years ago

"I‘m wondering in what parts the Librem 5 will be more open than a Nexus running CopperheadOS."

The device drivers for one. I'm not aware of any Nexus device with open-source device drivers.

ramshorns• 9 years ago

The operating system too. CopperheadOS uses a noncommercial license, so it's not open source or free software.

JepZ3• 9 years ago

Is there any special reason why they choose Matrix instead of XMPP?

subway3• 9 years ago

It feels like over the past few years most of the XMPP crowd has shifted to Matrix.

XMPP failed to get BOSH out the door quickly enough to maintain traction.

aloisdg• 9 years ago

matrix about xmpp:

What is the difference between Matrix and XMPP?

The Matrix team used XMPP (Openfire, ejabberd, spectrum, asmack, XMPPFramework) for IM before starting to experiment with open HTTP APIs as an alternative in around 2012. The main issues with XMPP that drove us in this direction as of 2012 were:

- Not particularly web-friendly - you can’t easily speak XMPP from a web browser. N.B. Nowadays you have options like XMPP-FTW and Stanza.io that help loads with letting browsers talk XMPP

- Single logical server per MUC is a single point of control and availability. MUCs can be distributed over multiple physical servers, but they still sit behind a single logical JID and domain. FMUC improves this with a similar approach to Matrix, but as of Oct 2015 there are no open source implementations. The MIX XMPP extension also aims to address this limitation.

- History synchronisation is very much a second class citizen feature

- Bridging to other protocols and defragmenting existing communication apps and networks is very much a second class citizen feature

- Stanzas aren’t framed or reliably delivered without extensions. See wiki.xmpp.org for an XMPP take on this

- Multiple device support is limited. Carbons and MAM aim to resolve this

- Baseline feature set is so minimal that fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common, especially as interoperability profiles for features have fallen behind (as of July 2015)

- No strong identity system (i.e. no standard E2E PKI, unless you count X.509 certs, which are questionable)

- Not particularly well designed for mobile use cases: push; bandwidth-efficient transports. Since the time of writing a Push XEP has appeared, and wiki.xmpp.org states that XMPP is usable over a 9600bps + 30s latency link.

This said, the whole area of XMPP vs Matrix is quite subjective. Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together. The more federation and interoperability the better.

We think of Matrix and XMPP as being quite different; at its core Matrix can be thought of as an eventually consistent global JSON db with an HTTP API and pubsub semantics - whilst XMPP can be thought of as a message passing protocol. You can use them both to build chat systems; you can use them both to build pubsub systems; each comes with different tradeoffs. Matrix has a deliberately extensive ‘kitchen sink’ baseline of functionality; XMPP has a deliberately minimal baseline set of functionality. If XMPP does what you need it to do, then we’re genuinely happy for you :) Meanwhile, rather than competing, an XMPP Bridge like Skaverat’s xmpptrix beta or jfred’s matrix-xmpp-bridge or Matrix.org’s own purple-matrix has potential to let both environments coexist and make the most of each other’s benefits.

source: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...

kepano• 9 years ago

This is an admirable effort, but unless tens of thousands of units are put into production it will be very difficult to get the attention of even the smallest Chinese OEMs. It appears they've pre-sold less than 2000 units. I wonder if it would be more fruitful to work from an existing phone with solid build quality and simplifying the process of jailbreaking it and installing FOSS on it.

chx3• 9 years ago

Separating the CPU and the baseband is going to be a challenge when building this device and impossible on any other device. But, if you want a libre phone then you must because the baseband will be a black box that's unavoidable.

j453• 9 years ago

Having the ability to create the first 2 or 3 waves of prototypes is nothing small. iPhone 1-3 needed improvement, similar to the galaxy note.

Maybe there's a Oneplus angle here where they can start small and lean with a partner.

wvh• 9 years ago

Jailbreaking and installing FOSS like Jolla is doing with Sailfish on Xperia X right this week, with some help from Sony Open Devices.

Still, it would be nice to have some hope do be able to do it without relying on manufacturers' goodwill... If ARM gets sufficiently commoditised so it's cheap (both time and money) enough for smaller players to create hardware, surely there must be enough open-source and/or privacy-oriented folks around to come up with a profitable product?

cameronhowe• 9 years ago

Jolla/Sailfish is not FOSS, and they have no plans to be so in the future either.

chx3• 9 years ago

I trust they did their research but separating the baseband from the CPU will be a major, major PITA.

closeneough• 9 years ago

Can you explain why?

chx3• 9 years ago

Read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722515

Baseband typically uses DMA to interact with the main system.

10011012• 9 years ago

Separate mobile baseband Ok, how do we know the hardware/software there pushes the goals of security and privacy? I2S hooked up? (that would scare me on a design with the stated goals, but it makes it really nice for getting good acoustics with your mechanicals) Simply pushing app processor encrypted data over the bearer?
i.MX Love the i.MX 6/8 APs, but I would recommend prototyping/de-risking the power budget up front.

100% open source warms my heart. Would love to see if this could be built.

comboy• 9 years ago

I imagine they cannot afford to do their own radio chip. And that's already enough to track you.

Android does not seem to be the problem.

When going with custom OS if this phone gets any traction then I'm pretty sure some helpful OS contributor from three-letter-agency will add something from his heart, because by running it you are already signaling that you are an interesting target.

tom_mellior2• 9 years ago

This crowdfunding campaign started on August 24. It was at $750000 after a month on September 26, needed ten more days to reach a million on October 4, and then somehow raised the remaining $500000 in five more days? This seems weird. They didn't have that much press over this last week.

I wonder if they had investors all along and only pretended to crowdfund.

(I'm not saying this is a scam or anything. I participated.)

Arathorn5• 9 years ago

My interpretation is between some concrete evidence of actually being able to build this (https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8 and https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/28/experiments-with-matrix-o...) and then hitting the $1M mark (https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-campaign-surges-past-one-mill...), the campaign finally got critical mass. These stories seemed to get pretty major press (e.g. top of HN).

rrix24• 9 years ago

Anecdata: I only chose to back it after they reached the 1mm mark.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

They got more publicity from Gnome and KDE backing the project.

__d• 9 years ago

I suspect that at first people held back, fearing that the project would be limited to the i.MX6 CPU, wouldn't get a critical mass, etc.

As the funding threshold neared, confidence grew, and more people signed up.

It might also just have taken people a week or two to decide to commit a bunch of money to a 15-months away delivery ...

mattnewport2• 9 years ago

I was (pleasantly) surprised by the fairly sudden jump too. I was an early backer and have been following the progress of the campaign and it looked like they were just going to make it last I checked, didn't expect to see it fully funded so early.

pfooti• 9 years ago

Yeah, that plus the fact that the campaign is just running on their own site (rather than a third-party crowdfund site like kickstarter, fig, crowdsupply or indiegogo) means that we're kind of relying on their word as to how much support they have really received.

My hope is that this is a successful campaign and that a good product is delivered, but the pre-order / crowdfund situation, at best, has an appearance of sketchiness.

pacala• 9 years ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a solution to run https://signal.org and nothing else? 5 out of 7 days I don't really need a smart phone, I only need the signal app.

Working to break my smart phone addiction.

j453• 9 years ago

You could run a tablet data plan sim (data only) in a mobile phone.

maerF0x02• 9 years ago

maybe build one w/ raspberry pi?

skymt• 9 years ago

If you're just looking for something to help with self-control, start by setting up parental controls on your phone. Having to tap in a lengthy passphrase to access apps not on your approved list breaks the instant feedback that feeds phone addiction.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

Congratulations! I'm looking forward to the actual release. It's quite hard and risky however, and if anything, previous failed projects are an indication of how volatile all this is (like hardware partners pulling support in the middle of the development cycle and so on).

It would be great to have a device running Linux with native Wayland, and LTE modem separated from the CPU for better security. I just hope they'll go with i.MX 8M so it will be 64-bit.

How is etnaviv for it though? I also wonder what's the level of OpenGL support in it. I suppose Vulkan support isn't even started?

starkruzr• 9 years ago

I've always wondered why open phone hardware is universally terrible in terms of capability and performance.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

Because no one made good ones open? ARM based SoC manufacturers have historically abysmal record of opening anything up.

It's a pity AMD and Intel didn't break into making good mobile CPUs and GPUs.

petecox3• 9 years ago

Th most interesting thing for me about i.MX is not 4K video or Vulkan. Quite the opposite. It is the chip powering my Kobo and, I suspect, Kindles.

An e-ink phone with a 3 day battery life! But being a hacker phone, as long as performance isn't too shabby when docked to a regular 3D accelerated LED monitor with Wayland desktop would be a nice balance.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

Good graphics stack is quite important too. I suppose they can crowdfund missing OpenGL and Vulkan support for etnaviv. I'd support such effort.

rallycarre• 9 years ago

Doesn't matter. They'll be a gov't backdoor in either the hardware or the software so you might as well get an android phone and load copperhead os on it as it will have the same result.

ZenoArrow11• 9 years ago

The Librem laptops come with hardware killswitches. The aim is to do the same with the Librem 5. Kind of hard for governments to spy on you using a microphone, camera, etc... without electricity.

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

Kinda hard to use the phone too, without electricity.

maerF0x02• 9 years ago

Will it have a GPS?

sipos2• 9 years ago

The page says yes, it is included in the list of sensors.

Whether they can deliver what they promise (I imagine GPS will not be the stumbling block here) is not certain of course, so I can't say "Yes - it will have GPS" with certainty.

greenhouse_gas• 9 years ago

Why don't they base their OS on Replicant?

It's FOSS, Linux-based, has apps and is Mobike-optimized.

uabstraction• 9 years ago

I don't know about you, but I want to get as far away from the whole Android ecosystem as possible. I don't want "Linux-based." I want fully fledged GNU/Linux in my pocket. I want to take advantage of GNOME/KDE's convergence interfaces. I want to develop real Unix software and port it to a phone without rewriting it for cocoa touch or Android's java API.

There is so much great software available for GNU/Linux that we have the potential to tap into, and many of them can be made to work on a 5" touchscreen with a little bit of elbow grease. Firefox OS and Ubuntu phones failed because they ignored the giant stack of software sitting right in front of us. Purism would do well to leverage the software we already have and love, rather than wasting time designing new application models and distribution channels which nobody asked for in the first place.

There's been a hole in my heart since the day the Nokia n900 was discontinued. I've got my fingers crossed on this one.

c0smic• 9 years ago

Really hope purism finds success with this. An open phone platform has been a long time coming, I hope they can learning from the missteps of ubuntu and firefox.

I like the idea of managing my phone like I manage my computer; install whatever OS and software I want on it. Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated and working, and if this is a primary communication device that effort becomes more urgent. But hey, I think that's just what it takes to not be dependent on a corporation that takes my data/info in exchange for device support.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 9 years ago

Of course, that comes with the additional effort of keeping it well updated

Yeah, but you actually get the option, and you, the owner of the device, have the power to make it happen.

gehsty3• 9 years ago

Crowd funded, then crowd sourced security updates? Really?

I think it is a noble effort with zero chance of success, its like Linux on the desktop, but with the further complication of expecting people to pay $$$ for out of date hardware, with what will no doubt be terrible software, with no apps users actually want to use....

annabellish• 9 years ago

The idea of giving the average user, or even the average power-user, a device which a) doesn't automatically and aggressively update, and b) is full of every single kind of mainstream radio is terrifying. Smartphones live in one of the most dangerous environments around for security - constantly connecting to third party networks on various protocols and technologies and intrinsically in close proximity to attackers - and not auto-updating puts the average user at risk.

emilsedgh• 9 years ago

additional effort of keeping it well updated and working

I don't know what you're talking about.

Almost every 5 years I get a new laptop, install Debian on it and it gets updated just fine forever.

And I customize it to the bone.

mikenew• 9 years ago

I "bought" mine. I'm not sure what their probability of success is, but if it's around 30% or so I'm fine with that. The world needs a viable alternative to the big 2 mobile OSs, and even if the market share is tiny the difference between having an alternative and not is huge.

I've been an iOS developer for years and made a comfortable living, but it bothers me on a deep and fundamental level that my primary communication and computing device is controlled by someone else, and the software I'm allowed to run and allowed to distribute is entirely decided by them. I'm willing to risk money if it helps our chances of having an alternative.

shmerl9• 9 years ago

We have free mobile OSes, but what's much harder is hardware where they can run.

cordite• 9 years ago

I hope it works better than the blackphone. I could barely use it for a year before the basic functionalities like battery life were impractacle.

andrefreitas• 9 years ago

Seems a good phone for those that use Smartphones and have concerns about privacy issues.

In term of applications, is a phone focused in a particular ecosystem: Matrix for encrypted communications and HTML5 Apps. Maybe it will suffer from the same pain as Ubuntu Phone? No native Apps being developed by major Companies? Maybe is a tradeoff that users can live with.

rrix24• 9 years ago

There's also plans to port KDE's mobile stack (including PIM suite) to the librem's operating system, providing at least one fairly comprehensive set of software.

Your bank probably won't ever have an app running on it though, you're right. I think most mobile apps that people use elsewise have decent enough PWAs that it won't be such an issue as long as PWAs are well supported at the UI layer.

petecox3• 9 years ago

Anbox.io is in its infancy - run Android apps in an LXC container.

sipos2• 9 years ago

It is annoying that they cannot be more committed to open hardware. (I'm not saying they should be).

I appreciate that they probably can't commit to it at this stage, but the fact that their laptops are not does not inspire confidence that the noises they make about trying will come to fruition.

gabryys• 9 years ago

A fully standards-based freedom-oriented system, based on Debian and many other upstream projects, has never been done before–we will be the first to seriously attempt this

What about OpenMoko?

bitmapbrother2• 9 years ago

Is the cell radio firmware also going to be open source? And if not why are they making claims of user privacy when they cannot guarantee the capabilities of some binary blob they have no control over?

rrix24• 9 years ago

By decoupling the baseband from the CPU so that it can't directly access the OS's memory+busses and securing communication on the wire (defaulting to secure messaging over Matrix, and using SSL everywhere) so that it can't be sniffed in transit by the modem.

I'm guessing that what this ends up looking like is a USB modem talking to the OS with pppd or a similar model that also enables voice calls over LTE

popopo1• 9 years ago

Legally speaking you are not allowed to run one

jordigh• 9 years ago

I haven't had a phone mostly because I refuse to have any non-free software controlling my life. I don't want to be tracked, manipulated, or have a computer attached to me at all times with a second, hidden computer inside that can do things I don't want it to do nor can even know about.

I'm excited about Librem, if it is what I think it will be: a phone I can completely trust.

I'm also extremely surprised that it got funded. 1.5e6 USD is not a modest goal given how stingy we usually are about freedom-respecting projects.

zanybear• 9 years ago

If Microsoft would support this from a distance - thru open source and maybe some financing - this would be their best play in the mobile space. They would achieve way more than Windows Mobile ever did.

quickben• 9 years ago

Ms doesn't enter markets where they have no control (OSS or closed ecosystems).

noncoml• 9 years ago

Jan 2019 seems a bit aggressive. If they do manage to pull it off thought, even for a later date, I will be definitely placing an order as soon as possible.

kakarot• 9 years ago

CPU separate from Baseband

How separate?

fghtr• 9 years ago

Why hasn't neo900 [0] been successful so far in comparison with the Lbrem 5? Are there any drawbacks in the former?

[0] https://neo900.org

pedroaraujo• 9 years ago

To be honest, the communication of the neo900 project is not that good. They only made two updates during the entire year of 2017 and even those don't say much about what exactly they have been doing all this time.

I'm not implying that they have been fooling around with the money but it gives me the impression that they are not good at planning things and communicating with people.

nitin_flanker• 9 years ago

Anybody aware of the exact specifications? For camera, screen resolution, battery?

I love the concept but being an average smartphone user I'm sure many people, like me, would like to know more about the basic things that we use everyday (camera for example).

onion2k• 9 years ago

There aren't any specs. This project is to design and build a privacy-oriented phone; it's not at the point where anything is settled on yet (afaik).

earlybike• 9 years ago

I'd love to have a BlackBerry-style phone with a keyboard and all main features are shell-based and implemented in a POSIX-like manner (with an optional GUI on top). But I think this will never happen.

hathym• 9 years ago

Would be much much easier if they built the OS for current hardware.. I don't understand why they need to build their own

Brakenshire3• 9 years ago

A phone that runs on the mainline kernel is the key part of this project, the software is secondary.

ptman• 9 years ago

please point out sufficiently open hardware

noxecanexx• 9 years ago

Does anyone know what they mean by support now and pay later

r3bl• 9 years ago

It means you select the amount of money and they deduct it from your account once the crowdfunding is done.

Before they've reached their goal, it was an "all-or-nothing" campaign, so the backers wouldn't lose any money if the goal was not reached.

hasteur• 9 years ago

Great... yet annother Open OS phone/computer. Not like that's been done before to "great acclaim". Anybody remember Jolla, the SailfishOS, and the Jolla Tablet?

s0me0ne• 9 years ago

I wonder why none of the feature phone OSes have been open sourced? Is it because they only work on the one device they were installed on? Cricket and all the other feature phones before smartphones had tons of Operating Systems, maybe that would give people a head start?

Librem 5 Phone Funded

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