Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.
The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don’t have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.
It’s nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.
As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get “clogged” in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.
Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.
The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.
Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.
Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It’s not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.
It certainly shows the potential for mobile Linux for sure. There’s a project https://postmarketos.org where you can install their mobile Linux OS on Android phones if you want to give it a try on a spare phone or something. The wiki lists what phones the OS can be installed on and what hardware features are working for each device.
When the phone is not set to suspend, and mostly idle with a couple of apps running, and some occasional web browsing, its about 4 hours. Under similar conditions using suspend (meaning it will keep the modem powered and wake up the rest of the device wen receiving phone calls and SMS) then I can get through a 9 hour workday and have about 40% battery left.
I have been daily driving the phone for a couple of years so I’m sure the battery has degraded some, but I don’t know how much difference I would get with a new one. It can be easily replaced, so I may do that in the future.
I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.
The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don’t have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.
It’s nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.
As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get “clogged” in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.
Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.
The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.
Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.
Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It’s not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.
That’s actually a selling feature.
Thank you ! This is a great review, I don’t know if I can live with the poor battery life, but looks like it’s a promising product from your review
It certainly shows the potential for mobile Linux for sure. There’s a project https://postmarketos.org where you can install their mobile Linux OS on Android phones if you want to give it a try on a spare phone or something. The wiki lists what phones the OS can be installed on and what hardware features are working for each device.
What kind of battery life do you actually get? I can barely scrape a fully day out of my phone right now so anything similar to that is fine by me!
When the phone is not set to suspend, and mostly idle with a couple of apps running, and some occasional web browsing, its about 4 hours. Under similar conditions using suspend (meaning it will keep the modem powered and wake up the rest of the device wen receiving phone calls and SMS) then I can get through a 9 hour workday and have about 40% battery left.
I have been daily driving the phone for a couple of years so I’m sure the battery has degraded some, but I don’t know how much difference I would get with a new one. It can be easily replaced, so I may do that in the future.
Lol I guess this sarcastic /s