Librem 5 Crosses $400k In Funding After Plasma Mobile Announcement

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 17 September 2017 at 08:55 AM EDT. 24 Comments
HARDWARE
Since announcing earlier this week that KDE is working on Plasma Mobile support for the Librem 5, Purism has managed to raise over $100k more towards their goal of building a free software GNU/Linux smartphone, but remain around 1.1 million dollars short of their goal.

The announcement of Plasma Mobile support -- while still planning to support GNOME on their device and it not being known yet if KDE/GNOME will be the default on the phone -- managed to gain a number of new supporters with crossing the $400k crowdfunding threshold this weekend.

It certainly was a big jump in their pledges for this effort that started in August. There still are 36 days to go for this all-or-nothing campaign to raise at least $1.5 million dollars to try to make this phone a reality. Thus they still need to be averaging at least $30k per day in order for this goal to be realized. As difficult as that will be, that could still end up being the easy part for their ambitious plan to have the yet-to-be-designed phone's hardware and software ready for shipping by early 2019.

As a reminder, their goal is to have the Librem 5 be a $599 smartphone running their security and privacy minded GNU/Linux PureOS operating system. The phone's hardware is still being firmed up but would be an i.MX6 or i.MX8 SoC with a 5-inch screen, support for all major wireless standards, hardware kill switches, IP-native mobile handset, and is also supposed to fulfill the long sought after Linux mobile/desktop convergence vision.

As of writing this Sunday morning they are at $403,685 USD from 602 individuals putting forth $599 USD for the smartphone, 38 backing at $299 for a developer kit, five backing at $1399 for including a 24-inch monitor too, and 10 backing at $1699 for including a 30-inch monitor for the convergence experience.

Those interested in learning more about the Librem 5 effort can visit Puri.sm.
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