The final specification of the Linux smartphone Librem 5 from Purism was released today. Most of the components were already known in broad outline, there are no surprises, only clarifications.
Specification of the Librem 5
The CPU is, as already known for a long time, an i.MX8M Quad from NXP with a maximum clock speed of 1.5 GHz. At the beginning of the development the i.MX6 was also under discussion, but it was already too outdated. With the market launch of the i.MX8M, the developers committed themselves to this. One of the two delays in the delivery of the Librem 5 is due to an error in the silicon of the i.MX8M, which fortunately could be fixed in time. Otherwise, the developers would have switched to the less powerful i.MX8M Mini.
Sufficient memory?
The ARM-CPU comes with a 64-bit Cortex A53 with four cores, an additional Cortex M4 and a Vivante GC7000Lite GPU with free driver. It supports OpenGL/ES 3.1, OpenCL 1.2 and Vulkan. The main memory is 3 GByte, but it is not otherwise specified yet. The internal memory uses eMMC and holds 32 GByte. This can be extended by up to 2 TByte by microSD. Regarding the internal memory, many supporters had wanted a doubling to 64 GByte.
Camera model not named
The models of the built-in cameras are also not known in detail. Only their performance is indicated with 13 MPixel for the main camera and 8 pixels for the front camera. The main camera also provides an LED flash. The Gemalto-Modem offers worldwide coverage with the variants PLS8E and PLSUS . The alternative modem BroadMobi BM818 uses the QMI protocol.
As already known, the Librem 5 has three hardware kill-switches that can switch off Wireless/Bluetooth, broadband as well as the camera and microphone at the touch of a button. If all three switches are in the Off position, the gyroscope, compass, GPS, proximity sensor and ambient light are also switched off. The other components of the Librem 5 are listed in the following table:
[ninja_tables id=“10828″]
No surprises
Purism adheres to the promised properties and partly specifies them with this publication. Many supporters have been asking about the built-in cameras for quite some time, but there is still no information on the manufacturer and model. The same is true for RAM, only the capacity is now known.
Delivery date is approaching
More important than the pure numbers and designations in the specification, however, is this sign of life with regard to the morale of the supporters, who, like me, were slowly doubting that the delivery date would be met in the third quarter. Now there will be more confidence again. This is further supported by observing the rising activities in the matrix channel lately.
A plethora of software to choose
, contacts
Recently there have been numerous reports about the software equipment. For the market start the developers concentrate mainly on the core components telephony, communication contacts and browser. More apps that will be ready are outlined by Bryan Lunduke in his Runs on the Librem 5 Smartphone series.
A list of Linux apps adapted for the smartphone form factor is available on the net. While browsing, I noticed that the messaging app Chatty will support the Telegram protocol as well as XMMS and Matrix. It is unclear whether Telegram will be activated by default. A user has succeeding in running WhatsApp on an experimental Qemu image.
