Progress made on Librem 5 smartphone
In an update report, the team behind the smartphone built on free and open source software shows how far it’s come along.
Like many of you, we’re looking forward to the Librem 5, a crowd-funded smartphone that will run on free and open source software and with a focus on security and privacy. We covered the device in depth in LXF229 and LXF231, so we’re always pleased to hear how the project is going. In a new progress report (which can be read at https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progressreport-5), Nicole Faerber, mobile development lead, has some promising news, with the Librem 5 development board fitted with a modem card, running a web browser and terminal window. As Nicole explains, work will need to be made to the GUI to make it usable on the Librem 5’s highresolution screen. Her team is currently working on the basic framework of the software, and they’re using oFono ( https://01.org/ofono), a piece of middleware that enables the modem to make phone calls and send and receive text messages. A screenshot shared with the progress report shows a successfully-sent SMS message, revealing how far the phone has come.
The blog post also goes into details about the challenges – and rewards – of building a smartphone from scratch, rather than, as Nicole puts it, a “yet-another Qualcomm SOC based phone”. A lot of research by the team was undertaken into the design of the phone, especially considering how modern smartphones are now made. As she explains, “current 3G/4G modems that include a firmware of 60 or more megabytes are becoming more common. It didn’t take long before storing this firmware became an issue as well as at run time, since this requires significant increases of RAM usage.” The entire blog post is well worth reading, as it shows the effort that’s going into what we hope will be a very special phone indeed.