Librem 5 Smartphone Hits Its $1.5 Million Dollar Goal

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 9 October 2017 at 03:41 PM EDT. 66 Comments
HARDWARE
With two weeks left in the crowdfunding campaign, Purism's Librem 5 smartphone initiative crossed its $1,500,000 USD funding goal.

While the campaign started out slow, it picked up immensely following the endorsements from the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. as well as word of Plasma Mobile coming to it, perhaps by default, but still too early to tell whether GNOME or KDE will win the default UI/UX of the Librem 5.

As of writing, the campaign sits at $1,508,358. This is made up of 146 developers ordering a $299 USD developer kit, 1,833 backers giving $599 USD for a Librem 5 phone, 19 spending $1399 to get the phone plus a 24-inch monitor, 29 backing at $1699 for the phone and a 30-inch monitor, two backing at $9,999 for getting 10 phones, and seven in at $19,999 USD for 10 phones and a greater enterprise bundle. So all in at this stage are just under 2,000 Librem 5 smartphones pre-ordered and over one hundred developer boards.

Now it's the tougher phase of the project for Purism to actually make the Librem 5 smartphone a reality. The company has ambitious plans to make this GNU/Linux smartphone a reality where Ubuntu Phone, Sailfish OS, Firefox OS, and others have largely failed. As well, it's on a rather ambitious timeline of getting the phone delivered to customers by early 2019 while still building the software stack and the phone itself not even being firmly designed yet. The company continues to figure out their SoC options between the i.MX6 and i.MX8.
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