Purism Shares The Progress Made On Their Librem 5 Smartphone For The End Of 2018

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 9 January 2019 at 11:57 AM EST. 10 Comments
HARDWARE
The folks at Purism have shared their latest status update on the Librem 5 Linux-powered, security-minded smartphone they plan to begin shipping in the months ahead.

As shared in December, the Librem 5 Developer Kits shipped. They share that anyone who ordered one should now have received it. With regards to the phone, they have a bill of materials and sourcing of parts figured out. They are still deciding between the i.MX8M and i.MX8M Mini still based upon their testing. They hope to have the phone design finalized this month.

On the software side some of their accomplishments for ending out 2018 included:

- Basic functionality for their "Calls" application to make/receive phone calls is now in place as well as basic features like ring tones.

- Hægtesse as a daemon that interfaces between the SIMCom SIM7100 modem and PulseAudio for configuring PulseAudio for a phone call.

- Libhandy continues making progress for adapting GTK3 applications to be more applicable to the form factor of mobile phones.

- Ongoing work for enabling "Virtboard" as their Wayland-based virtual keyboard.

- Purism's Chatty application for SMS and encrypted chat communication can now send SMS messages between phones.

- Various mockups of GNOME software they intend to adapt for their UI/UX on the Librem 5.

- Some improvements to WLroots as their Wayland implementation/bindings.

- Idle detection, lock shield, fixes, and other work to their Phosh Wayland shell.

- Various upstream patches to the GNOME Control Center, GNOME Contacts, GTK, GLADE, Epiphany, ModemManager, and other components.

More details on the current state of this Linux smartphone via the Purism blog.
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