Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life

https://puri.sm/posts/dogwood-thermals-and-battery-life/

by Stephen304 • 6 years ago

144 90 6 years ago

mikece• 6 years ago

Promising, but how close is it to being ready for consumer use? If all it can do is make/receive phone calls, SMS, and act as a WiFi hotspot, and cost less than USD$300 that would satisfy my list of desires.

airstrike• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly, the last thread I saw on this, the biggest hurdle was the sheer size of the device. It looked like it was discovered in a time capsule from the 1990s

mr_spothawk• 6 years ago

Excellent.

RandomBacon• 6 years ago

One person's "con", another person's "pro".

paulcole• 6 years ago

You weren't kidding. They do a pretty good job of hiding photos that show the side view. But wow that thing is dummy thicc.

gentleman112• 6 years ago

Not mine. I need anki, authy, a calculator, a good podcast app, an audiobook app, a VPN, security/privacy, and then just a really long battery life.

An aside: if apple would stop making the new iOS updates so draining on older phones it would help - the last iOS update took my battery from 2.5 days without a charge to 1.7 days “overnight” - imagine what this did to people who didn’t buy the silly oversized model with the lower screeen resolution? It’s basically a malware attack on their users to force them to update

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

PinePhone has most of those, but if you're insisted on a specific app/brand, you are limiting yourself. For instance, Mobian comes with a 2FA app. Authy is a bad security choice anyways because you shouldn't send your 2FA tokens to a cloud.

vngzs• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm pretty far from being able to switch to a Linux phone without the ability to read TOTP tokens from YubiKeys. For apps that don't support hardware tokens, I store the TOTP seeds on a YubiKey, which prevents malware on the phone from being able to steal my seeds.

junipertea• 6 years ago

You are always free not to install the latest update and have the android experience of using an old version OS on a 2 year old phone. On a serious note, I don't think they reduce your battery on purpose, the class action lawsuits Apple lost handled that. It might be just optimising runtime and letting your phone handle new apps? So CPU runs faster and squeezes out more performance?

kop3166• 6 years ago

The Pinephone can do that actually:

https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=pinephone

How to set up a wifi HotSpot is here: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tweaks

Although note, as of now, neither the Pinephone nor the Librem 5 can do MMS (they both share ModemManager and it doesn't have MMS functionality)

nt8r2• 6 years ago

You can use ofono and mmsd on the Pinephone to get MMS working for both attachments and group chats: https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/

fosco2• 6 years ago

Although note, as of now, neither the Pinephone nor the Librem 5 can do MMS (they both share ModemManager and it doesn't have MMS functionality)

are there any recent discussions about debugging MMS on Pinephone I could peruse?

jmiserez• 6 years ago

MMS as in text messages with images? Is that still relevant?

I remember the original iPhone not supporting MMS either but that was 13 years ago and I haven't received or sent an MMS since.

jchw5• 6 years ago

I just recently received my PinePhone Braveheart unit, which is by no means a similar device. However, I did try running Mobian, which runs a similar stack (including Librem’s innovative Phosh.) It actually is pretty impressive, and even though it is not aimed at consumer use it is pretty close to being usable as a basic phone with Linux.

There’s really two problems.

1. Speed. The CPUs are just underwhelming. It is not unusable by any means, but it definitely feels like many steps backwards. I think at least the PinePhone needs to be running lighter software; Wayland is certainly not an issue, but a lot of heavy GTK software is probably not a good idea. Web browsing is tricky and makes me wish there existed lightweight browser engines that implemented less of the web standard, but it is actually passable believe it or not.

2. Linux desktop software is just not designed for phones. I think Phosh is clever, and feels very nice to use... until you remember its a phone, and then realize the inherent differences. Normal phones have some kind of central push notification management, but not here. I assume when the device sleeps, you simply stop getting any notifications. I haven’t actually seen a notification pop up on the lockscreen yet, so I’m not sure. There’s an SMS and messaging app, and Telegram/tdesktop works really well, so there is that.

I think that both problems could be solved somehow, but it’s feeling like it could be a tough one. One of the things that both iOS and Android did right off the bat was dramatically change the model of execution that apps had, to orient them around the concept of constantly being swapped in and out. There’s really no obvious way you can support standard Linux desktop apps without some compromise here. I would actually be pretty happy if these devices were capable of just staying awake on a low frequency most of the time, because I think that would dramatically simplify things, but you would have to worry a lot about power draw from apps running and etc in ways that you don’t have to in most modern phones.

Some may view the lack of a good push notification story as a benefit, but for me there are definitely things where I want it to be reliable and timely... so I am left feeling a bit lost.

qchris• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I've had that issue with Mobian--I definitely am able to receive phone calls while it's sleeping in the other room, so it's not like there's an inherent inability to push notifications during sleep. I think that using `libnotify-bin` is the recommended library for doing notifications at the moment, although I haven't tested it to see if it pops up during sleep.

I did my first "Hello, world" app for it on Mobian on Pinephone, linked below, with that library and that seems to work pretty well.

[1] https://github.com/quietlychris/mobian_hello

Edit: After some prelim testing, it does look like the notification from the example I linked doesn't get pushed to the phone while it's sleeping. Unless there's been a fix pushed in the week or so since I've updated it, looks like that's still a to-do.

zozbot2343• 6 years ago

Wayland is certainly not an issue, but a lot of heavy GTK software is probably not a good idea

GTK by itself is quite light, even GTK3. It's certainly lighter than the Java UX of Android.

seba_dos18• 6 years ago

[disclaimer: I work for Purism] Having both Librem 5 and PinePhone right in front of me, I'd say that it's RAM speed, not CPU that's underwhelming. Librem 5 feels much snappier to use, even for such tasks as apt-getting over ssh. They have pretty similar CPUs, but Librem 5's RAM is more than twice as fast as PinePhone's and it shows.

The Vivante GPU is also pretty capable: https://social.librem.one/@dos/104218666011152589

Notifications on the lockscreen are planned, just give it some time :)

I assume when the device sleeps, you simply stop getting any notifications.

That's true, and that's one of the reasons why Librem 5 doesn't utilize suspend yet - the idle times as seen in the article are just that: idle, not sleeping. We could have made integrating suspend in ATF our top priority, but there's still a lot of groundwork needed before it will actually make enough sense. There's plenty of other power management work to focus on first.

Waterfall6• 6 years ago

It's been promising for years and under delivering. You could get all that with a cheapo phone that is given out free on prepaid.

gentleman112• 6 years ago

I’m a little jealous of the engineers who get to work on this project. It would be so exciting to build something like this from the ground up, improving it constantly. The challenge, scope, and meaning are compelling, no?

akiselev7• 6 years ago

I've worked on smartphone electronics and it's not as exciting as you think. I'm pretty sure they chose the i.MX8 because they couldn't source Snapdragons so they got a little luckier with NXP, but the vast majority of the engineering done on a smartphone is in firmware and software with absolutely shitty support from the manufacturer. Bug fixes that only get distributed to customers after they've ran into the bug and struggled with it for weeks (instead of just putting the bug fix into the BSP), no version control or historical view of vendor drivers or modified kernels, firmware that has "hello world" levels of polish, documentation that is only available under three levels of NDAs, and few open source projects to learn from for what are usually almost-but-not-quite bespoke PCBs. Worst of all, consumer hardware products can sell at such scale that it's worth it to keep an engineer working on a single bug for months at a time only to find out that it was a bug in vendor silicon all along - it is soul crushing. Silicon manufacturers have very little respect for software and it really makes the entire process a lot more painful than it should be.

Iterations in electronics are really expensive (my last project cost $30k for 10 assembled prototypes not including of our labor) so most people just copy as much of the manufacturers' reference design as they need. They pour over PCB layout notes and look at how the manufacturer or other customers did and mostly just copy them. Most of my engineering decisions are based on about a dozen black box helper apps that take in my fab's capabilities and signal specs and spit out DRC rules. It gets a little trickier with antenna design but that's often outsourced because you need very specialized facilities for FCC certification anyway.

All in all, it's just like working on a complex distributed system. There are so many things to juggle like R&D budget, per unit COGS and space budget, suppliers and part availability, and supply chain orchestration that it ends up being lots of boring work just to coordinate between all the different experts involved with small bursts of productivity when everyone is properly aligned.

dkdk8283• 6 years ago

Sounds more like writing open kernel drivers, except you get paid.

Still aspiring to work on something challenging is healthy and I respect GP’s sentiment!

google234123• 6 years ago

And NXP is generally considered a very good vendor to work with!

m-ee• 6 years ago

Curious what helper apps you're using, I've always set my own DRC rules but have been mostly on the R&D side so it wasn't as critical

solarkraft• 6 years ago

Silicon manufacturers have very little respect for software and it really makes the entire process a lot more painful than it should be.

Do you know why? In my eyes that would make them a crazy unattractive supplier.

zozbot2343• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure they chose the i.MX8 because they couldn't source Snapdragons

I'm pretty sure that it was expressly chosen because it's reasonably documented unlike most SoC chips. Not that this solves the expense and effort with iterating hardware, of course.

mac01021• 6 years ago

The battery life when idle is shown here to be 5 or 6 hours.

Any other consumer-grade phone gets something like 24-36 hours by sleeping a lot (or something).

Should I expect the Librem 5 developers to be able to achieve the same thing before they ship Evergreen?

LawnGnome• 6 years ago

That's screen on, though, if you look at the title of the chart. That's probably no worse than my Pixel 3 (which is by no means an endurance athlete, but is probably fairly representative of the Android mass market).

The lack of screen off times in the article is definitely worrying, though. That's just as important a metric.

Edited to add: actually, the first graph is screen off, I think. Looks like it's a tick under 10 hours. Which is poor, so I hope there's more scope for software improvement, but I also think is a fairly significant improvement over where they were 6-12 months ago.

boogies• 6 years ago

The pinephone recently got a 40% increase in idle battery life to ~100 hours with the modem off and ~24 with it on https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/july-updatepmos-ce-pre-ord... (control-f search for "crust"). I would hazard a guess that this might be portable to the Librem 5 (but maybe they already implemented it, IDK).

Edit: but my two sibling comments now seem to have more useful information than this one.

biktor_gj• 6 years ago

Crust runs in a RISC cpu inside the Allwinner chip, and it only works in that. I don't know if the NXP chip has a 'dedicated' core to manage the actual ARM cores, but all the work done in Crust won't be portable to the Librem, if it can be done, it'll have to be done from scratch

seba_dos18• 6 years ago

Crust is, simplifying a bit, just something that enables suspend to RAM on Allwinner platforms. From what I know you don't need anything like that on i.MX8MQ, since the SoC and PMIC will already take care of what's needed there by themselves.

Keep in mind that that "idle time" is actually "suspended time" - to handle things like incoming notifications over the Internet you still have to periodically wake up. Without suspend, PinePhone currently has a pretty similar idle power usage to Librem 5's. Once Librem 5 starts utilizing suspend to RAM, it should see a very similar improvement like the one you're linking to.

cesarb• 6 years ago

The key is probably this sentence: "In the future, we are also planning to support suspend to RAM." That is, the CPU is never being fully powered off, only clocked down.

AFAIK, Android uses suspend-to-RAM heavily (this is what a "wakelock" is all about: it prevents Android from suspending when held), and that has a large impact on battery life.

wott4• 6 years ago

The key is probably this sentence: "In the future, we are also planning to support suspend to RAM."

A distant future. A Purism employee (who will probably show up here since he takes part in each HN thread related to Purism) said nobody is working on it. So don't hold your breath in the near future.

akiselev7• 6 years ago

Should I expect the Librem 5 developers to be able to achieve the same thing before they ship Evergreen?

It's unlikely it'll get as good as Samsung or Apple by that time but it should definitely improve. Unless they made some critical mistake in the hardware, they can make continuous improvements in the software.

It's no surprise that this is one of the last things they're focusing on. Idle power management on modern operating systems is hard and is very kernel and hardware specific because kernel interrupt and process scheduling comes into play. Hence why Apple is so good at battery life - they have such unilateral control over the hardware and software stack that they can make optimizations that Linux/Windows/Android really struggle with.

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

These are the kind of breakdowns I'd like on every phone out there. If they were to publicly release a standardized battery testing procedure with a list of all hardware used for testing, the would make it much easier to compare battery life across phones on the market.

Good job.

Waterfall6• 6 years ago

This phone is an embarrassment. Petty mismanagement https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T... , subpar products, and breakdowns like this are nice, but you know what's better? Getting a working phone then getting the behind the scenes look rather than 2 unfinished products. It has none of the charm of the n900, at least pinephone is much cheaper, although I don't see a point to a Linux phone when they're mainlining a bunch of snapdragons like the one in the s9, with full network support. Once postmarketOS succeeds there's little reason to get these Linux phone as devices, and the main reason was good support before postmarketOS ported Linux but the hardware is pretty bad. Poor hardware and poor software for a hefty price, a phone that when sold wasn't even functional and is still rough around the edges.

Townley• 6 years ago

You’re not wrong that the project has had issues and unforced errors. I’ve felt similar disappointment at the slow progress, misleading statements, and product limitations.

But they’re one of precious few companies with a fighting chance of bringing open software to mobile. For that reason alone, they’re still on the side of the angels in my opinion.

So root for the Pinephone and PostmarketOS, and continue to hold Purism accountable. But if Purism and the Librem have an outside shot at positively contributing to the mobile landscape if given the chance, then entirely-valid criticisms of the company and product should be tempered with that chance in mind.

Waterfall6• 6 years ago

I would like to think that pine and purism had some effect on the mainlining, but project treble for Google had been thought of separately. I won't buy their hardware at this rate, but I hope they'll have a good mark on the Linux phone.

pcdoodle• 6 years ago

They're doing something incredibly hard and I'll cut some slack to turn the idea into a usable product.

Also their desktop OS is pretty sweet. If they converge the two (texts, clipboard, calls), it will be worth the bumps in the road.

I will pick one up when 14nm is introduced. It's a damned server in your pocket.

Waterfall6• 6 years ago

You can have it converged with Android and KDE connect already. These problems are absent from pine, so it's not the fact it's a Linux device it's incompetence that causes these issues.

If you want a Linux phone you can check the port status of postmarketOS or just get something like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meizu_PRO_5_Ubuntu_Edition

None of the behind the scenes crap, no constant delays and no drama, with way better hardware for a cheaper price. If you want a server in your pocket the pine works for that but so does a cheap Android phone too.

gibsonhouse• 6 years ago

Is it easier at this point to try and make Android secure?

ta17711771• 6 years ago

Yes. GrapheneOS is pursuing/accomplishing this.

AOSP is one of the most secure consumer OS around right now, surprisingly.

retpirato• 6 years ago

Does the phone work on this yet? That's the most important thing, otherwise it's just a tiny tablet. How will connecting it with a carrier work?

Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life

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