Puri.sm Librem 5 Phone Ships, Pine64 Pinephone Coming, Linux and BSD Phones

[Kurt Buff - GSEC, GCIH]

https://medium.com/@thegrugq/secured-android-smartphone-32b28ae3fbd8

On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 12:03 AM grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> https://www.pine64.org/
>
>
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/09/purisms-librem-5-phone-starts-shipping-a-fully-open-gnulinux-phone/
> https://puri.sm/posts/first-librem-5-smartphones-are-shipping/
> https://pureos.net/
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuT2w6BkT-k
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvnt78mK-Ac
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHcHi0TBFv4
> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64-PJ-yoF7aJ9pIHWEbrTQ/videos
>
> Support the Digital Rights Movement... Get this phone !
>
> Purism announced their first Librem 5 smartphones were rolling off the
> assembly line and heading to customers. "Seeing the amazing effort of
> the Purism team, and holding the first fully functioning Librem 5, has
> been the most inspirational moment of Purism's five year history,"
> said their founder and CEO Todd Weaver.
>
> On Wednesday they posted a video announcing that the phones were now
> shipping, and Friday they posted a short walk-through video. "The
> crowdsourced $700 Linux phone is actually becoming a real product,"
> reports Ars Technica: Purism's demand that everything be open means
> most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question.
> Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal
> construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones
> today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated
> into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house
> full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just
> like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look
> massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably
> replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted...
>
> [Y]ou're not going to get cutting-edge hardware at a great price with
> the Librem 5. That's not the point, though. The point is that you are
> buying a Linux phone, with privacy and open source at the forefront of
> the design. There are hardware kill switches for the camera,
> microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband on the side of the phone,
> ensuring none of the I/O turns on unless you want it to. The OS is the
> Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS, a Linux distribution that,
> in this case, has been reworked with a mobile UI. Purism says it will
> provide updates for the "lifetime" of the device, which would be a
> stark contrast to the two years of updates you get with an Android
> phone.
>
> PureOS is a Debian-based Linux distro, and on the Librem 5, you'll get
> to switch between mobile versions of the Gnome and KDE environments.
> If you're at all interested in PureOS, Purism's YouTube page is worth
> picking through. Dozens of short videos show that, yes, this phone
> really runs full desktop-class Linux. Those same videos show the dev
> kit running things like the APT package manager through a terminal, a
> desktop version of Solitaire, Emacs, the Gnome disk utility, DOSBox,
> Apache Web Server, and more. If it runs on your desktop Linux
> computer, it will probably run on the Librem 5, albeit with a possibly
> not-touch-friendly UI. The Librem 5 can even be hooked up to a
> monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you can run all these Linux apps
> with the normal input tools...
>
> Selling a smartphone is a cutthroat business, and we've seen dozens of
> companies try and fail over the years. Purism didn't just survive long
> enough to ship a product -- it survived in what is probably the
> hardest way possible, by building a non-Android phone with demands
> that all the hardware components use open code. Making it this far is
> an amazing accomplishment.