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First Impressions of the FINAL LIBREM 5 HARDWARE

Checkout @TheLinuxGamer's impressions (far from an extensive review however) on the "final" hardware of the Librem 5 - it's nice to have a video instead of a Purism forum post to read. Unsure if this is his own unit due from backing or if Purism sent him the device (he mentions it's a review device im the video so I assume the latter?) but nice to see either way.

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7 comments
  • This is seriously not me being a jerk. I have been following this project for years. At this point can you actually just buy a phone from them or do you buy one and get stuck on some wait list for an unknown period of time? From the video shared a few things are sort of shocking out of the box for a consumer release. first of all no account creation on login or at a minimum a prompt to change your password on login seems not great. Sure you can just change your password but having 1-6 be the default password that doesn't get updated on login is so easy to fix I am surprised it's still like this. Next that keyboard is definitely overly cramped and seems very difficult to use. To me that is a bit of a deal breaker for a phone now a days because typing is so essential. 1300 for a phone that is essentially beta and a project phone still seems unobtainable for most people. Again I don't want to hate on this as I really want it to work but there is so much working against it at the moment in my estimation.

    • @drascus
      If you want to get it semi-quickly, you buy USA edition. I preordered Standard edition in 2019, got it this May. Software state is "fun to tinker with, but if you give this to a normie they will probably kill themselves in a matter of minutes."
      There also still is some software essential to my workflow that doesn't fit on the phone screen, so I needed a dock to set it up with external display, mouse and keyboard.

      RN it's a toy and a devkit, not an end-user product.
      @Axaoe

      • Many people expect it to be a privacy oriented daily driver phone, and consequently end up getting very disappointed. The marketing doesn’t help either, because Purism is not pitching it as a tinker phone.

  • Pretty cool. It seems that there has been plenty if progress, but there is still a long way to go.

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