> In fact, while I’ve been generally impressed with the pace of improvements from all over I think that there are still some critical areas where the phones fall short. For the Librem 5, the battery life and thermals are definitely this device’s Achilles heel. For the Pinephone, I think the weakness of some of the hardware is problematic and isn’t something that most people would want to put up with.
It seems like hardware is the big gap here. It must be tough to innovate on hardware with low-volume niche devices, creating a chicken and egg dilemma for adoption. Are there any realistic options for these two phones to have more regular/modern iterations of their hardware? Perhaps a partnership with some existing manufacturer that is struggling for relevance in the phone space like LG or Motorola?
>Perhaps a partnership with some existing manufacturer that is struggling for relevance in the phone space like LG or Motorola?
This is kinda what Jolla did with the Sailfish X program - they periodically choose one of the mid-range Sony Xperia devices that are part of the Sony open device program, then port Sailfish OS (a pretty nice mobile Linux distro) on it and sell licenses to people.
It's not a partnership per se, rather a symbiosis, but has been working like this for years. Also nice that they support the devices long after official support for the original Android firmware has ended. :)
Author here: a lot of the FOSS stack can run on Android-based phones today!
I think the hardware is a limiting factor, but part of what makes these devices unique (as other commenters have pointed out) is that they can run with minimal proprietary blobs. I don't believe either phone is at "no blobs" yet, since even Purism had to have blobs for the Baseband and Wifi (I think, or maybe it was just Wifi?). Nevertheless, Ubuntu Touch does work on Android devices today, and I think even PostmarketOS has some adoption on OnePlus 6/6T.
Overall though, I'd say that power isn't really the big thing. I think existing software has shown that you really don't need a lot of compute to be able to run apps smoothly on these phones (Morph browser, many GTK apps on the Librem 5). Battery life remains a concern with these devices, but that seems to improve bit by bit over time (at least, the Pinephone does. Not sure what is up with my Librem).
I think getting a partnership would be doubly tricky though, because a lot of the market just doesn't want these phones to begin with, and struggling companies are unlikely to attempt to explore mobile Linux unless they know it'll turn their ship around. Maybe if they get banned from using Android somehow (much like Huawei was), but even then I can't say I'm sure that Linux is appealing for companies in that scenario.
> even Purism had to have blobs for the Baseband and Wifi (I think, or maybe it was just Wifi?)
Baseband and Wifi both run blobs, but not on the main CPU and not from the userspace. As a result, the phone is the only one recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/.
Stuff like the above-mentioned N900 could reach weeks of uptime without any suspend-to-RAM (and at least a couple days with wifi on). There is something definitely wrong here.
All these blobs can get easily updated/replaced by the user without having to hack the hardware in any way. For some reason there's a lot of FUD going on around that issue.
How is it FUD? Yeah open-source drivers will get updated. The binary blob firmware of a component? Not really. If you replace it, it will still has the old/potentially buggy firmware.
The FUD is about not being able to reflash and update the blobs just because they're not stored in the rootfs. It won't get done as part of regular system updates because they're non-free, but you're able to do it on your own pretty easily.
Don't discount software optimization. For example, Apple has extensive software optimization that works hand in hand with their hardware optimizations to deliver battery life and control thermals. I'm sure Google does similar things for Android too.
There is more to having a successful mobile device than just dropping a formerly optimized for desktop OS on them.
Plus you are focused on the wrong part of the stack. Pine and Librem are acceptable device manufacturers. They just need better SoCs / better software support for existing SoCs. Think Samsung Exynos, Rockchip, Mediatek.
Pine64 is using Rockchip SoCs in other products. In the past they have done SBCs with a SoC before putting it in more challenging designs like the tablet and phone, maybe there will be a RK3566 phone at some point.
The RK3566-based Quartz64 boards currently getting released have been explicitly stated as the dev-platform for any upcoming devices. So barring something very unforeseen, I would expect a next-gen RK3566 pinephone being announced within a couple of years and released within 2-4y or so.
Keep in mind Pinephone is (at least current gen) primarily intended as a dev device with a long lifecycle.
It's too small a market for even mid-sized manufacturers to care about. Even if they did, the major SoC vendors aren't open enough currently (the major limiting factor) to make this viable. So for the time being, we're limited to small device runs that iterate infrequently based on low-end and often older SoCs.
> Perhaps a partnership with some existing manufacturer that is struggling for relevance in the phone space like LG or Motorola?
Not sure about the Pinephone, but Purism explained that they were searching for hardware allowing 100% FLOSS. i.MX 8M Quad SoC worked for that: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/. No other mainstream manufacturer is interested in that.
> In fact, while I’ve been generally impressed with the pace of improvements from all over I think that there are still some critical areas where the phones fall short. For the Librem 5, the battery life and thermals are definitely this device’s Achilles heel. For the Pinephone, I think the weakness of some of the hardware is problematic and isn’t something that most people would want to put up with.
It seems like hardware is the big gap here. It must be tough to innovate on hardware with low-volume niche devices, creating a chicken and egg dilemma for adoption. Are there any realistic options for these two phones to have more regular/modern iterations of their hardware? Perhaps a partnership with some existing manufacturer that is struggling for relevance in the phone space like LG or Motorola?