Took 3 years to get mine. I didn't sign up for call service and can't comment on call quality. They push updates regularly and the quality consistently improves. It could hardly take a picture when I got it. Now, it takes a decent photo. As others have commented, the product is ideologically driven. That's the main buy-in for me—I'd like to see more free software in consumer products. At the very least, it's an expensive and fun pocket computer. Maybe its vision reaches full fruition. Maybe it helps the next attempt to open up mobile.
I'm surprised people are returning this. It's an ideologically driven product. I'd expect it to have a few more warts than your typical consumer product.
The trade off is that you get a totally open source phone. For some people that is important. For others it's not, but why would they pre-order if it's not?
People might be willing to pay more and wait longer for an open source phone, but when they finally get the phone they do still expect it to not suck. So high returns suggests that the phone sucks after all. I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
> I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
This is not at all consistent with my N9 experience.
But it was a disappointment in terms of not delivering source for a reproducible FOSS firmware a community could form around and iteratively improve, nor did they facilitate easily replacing the OS/distro.
If the N9 had the pinephone'seasily replaced 100% FOSS firmware via SD cards and community, we'd be in a very different place today.
I believe most of the source was available but maybe some stuff was missing. Same with the N900 which was also nearly unusable. I frankly liked the Blackberry style Nokias better (E63 etc.) and source for those would have been great.
> the [N9] or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
Maybe you should have paid full price... ;) I believe the one you got had some defect.
I used a N9 (daily driver) for about 10 years (until I got a L5, actually...), and it wasn't especially slow (OK, the storage was slow for writes). Things started getting worse and worse due to the lack of SW updates (so no support for newer TLS versions for instance), but that is another story.
I think the 3G networks in the US were all shut down now, so N9's won't work here any more. Also my N9 and N900 were both unbearably slow. No idea what you did to get yours to run faster, or maybe you're just more patient than me ;).
Coming up on a year with my Librem 5 USA. So much has changed. I started with no video. You had to manually adjust the camera for pictures. Maps app was opening with only the upper left corner of the application viewable on screen. Heck, the gps would place me just off of Ivory Coast(from USA). Pictures sent by text had to be opened in the file browser. No suspend feature had you scrambling for a plug after 2-3 hours use. Well, Video is here(barely), auto adjusting settings for pictures is here. Open maps works and gps gets me within 15 miles. Pictures render in text threads. Auto suspend is here. So many other things have come a long way in just <365 days. I suppose one could argue this is all just low hanging fruit, but the community is there. I am constantly getting updates, every few months there are big changes. It does suck that so many people haven't gotten the phone they paid for. And it saddens me more that many are so relieved to return it or sell it off when they finally do get it and beg others to avoid it. I remember when my best friend in highschool got the first iPhone. It was slow, buggy, no 3rd party apps. All it had was two things, a browser, and excitement about what the future could hold. The iPhone launched when smart phones were in infancy. The Librem 5 is almost 20 years behind. It is going to take some time to get up to speed. It is not going to take remotely close to 20y, but it won't be tomorrow either. All I can really say is, I really feel the excitement and wonder all over again with the Librem 5 , plus, it has a decent browser.
Summary: With apologies for the delay, we are now preparing your Librem
5 to ship and need you to read this email carefully with replying until
May 01, 2023.
It kind of gives the vibe of a kickstarter project that didn't implode, but instead... eventually got their product out the door and shipping to people.
I wonder what the people who run the company would do differently, a 2nd time around? That's if they'd be up for doing it again.
This interview with the former CTO was interesting, relevant quote:
> Entire group was on board with this (which was "no, we are not ready"), except Todd who just said that we are doing it in a month and we are starting one way or another that phone campaign.
it really feels like, they should have been given just pure venture capital and a lot more time and test hardware in small batches. And then with enough knowledge pick real good hardware and then deliver a kick ass linux phone. The processor is about 6 years old, a lot will not be working at this time, i still support the idea of a linux phone, i really hope it gets better in the next few years. this android, ios duopoly really sucks ass
I got mine a month ago; ordered oktober 2019. Since than tried the Pinephone and PPP as a daily driver. The Librem5...it's slower and clunkier than the Pinephone pro. Both last less than 24 hours on a charge(suspend and calls seem to be a difficult problem tot fix). In the end, these may be nice tinkering devices, but nowhere near anything that you can reliably use as a phone. I now use a Fairphone 4 + Calyxos, and am quite happy with it. Spotify instead of Ncspot, Bluetooth that works, calls that work, no more buggy mobile Firefox config, reliable maps, messaging clients that work in the background. Most importantly; a battery that last at least 2 days, with reliable fast-charging. Purism, Pine and the Opensource community around it are just too small; either they run out of cash and/or people burn out trying to make it happen. A whole different case, but Valve's steamdeck is IMO a good example that Linux-based products with a good value proposition are possible, under the right circumstances.
A full year lead time on a laptop seems insane to me. I like supporting open hardware companies, but am not so keen on supporting companies that can't seem to get their shit together. Even 5 months is a good long wait.
