Purism’s Linux smartphone will be available from April 2019

Purism says its Librem 5 smartphone will be released in April 2019. That is a few months later than planned, due to bugs in the hardware used. The smartphone has a soc from NXP and runs on PureOS, a Linux variant with an emphasis on privacy and security.

Purism has released new details about the production of the Librem 5 smartphone. When a crowdfunding of $1.5 million was raised at the end of 2017, the plan was to ship the phone from January 2019, but that has now been postponed to April.

The delay is related to two bugs in NXP’s i.MX 8 soc that Purism uses for its smartphone. Those bugs relate to power management and would have a negative impact on the battery life of the device. Purism is working with NXP on a solution.

In an extensive blog post, Purism provides more technical details about the production of the phone. In it, the makers also say that the hardware bugs in the soc would ensure that the battery of the device would be empty within an hour. Purism also explains that the modem will be separated from the soc for security reasons. The modem is placed on the usb bus instead of around the ram bus, so that communication can take place completely separately from the soc.

Purism is currently working on new devkits for its device, which should be released to developers in October. Interested parties can order the device before it comes out, for $ 599.

At the end of last year, Purism met its crowdfunding goal for creating the Librem 5 smartphone. The makers want to counterbalance Google and Apple with their own system. The phone runs on Linux distribution PureOS, but can also run other Linux distributions. PureOS includes the Tor browser, and privacy tools such as Privacy Badger. All communications are end-to-end encrypted with Matrix.