Librem 5 Development Boards Won't Be Shipping Now Until At Least August

Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019.

Among the highlights from their latest update include:

- The i.MX6 experimental software images now use their Phosh Wayland Shell and are experimenting with the PureOS base rather than Debian Buster testing.

- In terms of the support for the i.MX8 hardware they actually want to use for the finished phone, at this stage they can now get their i.MX8 software image booting "a very basic mainline kernel" over the vendor-supplied kernel.

- Various improvements to Phosh are ongoing around display configuration / external display support, gamma control, and more.

- Epiphany will be the default web-browser on the Librem 5 smartphone and they are upstreaming optimizations to make this app work better on small screen sizes.

- A messaging app is being worked on using Pidgin's libpurple.

- Due to external factors, their plan to ship development boards beginning in June didn't pan out. They have a new rough estimate of shipping development boards starting in August.

All their latest details on this ambitious Linux smartphone project can be found via the Purism blog.