Purism’s first smartphone is now shipping. The Librem 5 is a smartphone with a 5.7 inch display, an NXP i.MX8M quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a 4,500 mAh battery.

It’s also one of only a handful of smartphones designed to ship with a GNU/Linux distribution rather than Android or iOS.

The phone has been under development for several years, and a small number of dev kits and pre-production units have already been shipped. But mass production of the first “Evergreen” batch hardware began recently, and earlier this month Purism announced that it would begin shipping the mass production version of the phone to customers.

Now that day has arrived.

The company says the first customers should receive their phones this month and/or in early December, with all pre-orders scheduled to ship by January or February.

Purism is still taking pre-orders for the Librem 5, but if you place an order today you’ll be placed at the back of the line and your phone probably won’t arrive until after all the early pre-orders have been shipped.

You’ll also have to pay a bit more for the price – the $50 pre-order discount has ended, and the Librem 5 is now selling for the full retail price of $799.

The company eventually hopes to reach shipping parity, meaning that customers who order a Librem 5 at that point will only have to wait 10 business days for their phone to ship. But we probably won’t know when that will be until early next year, after all existing pre-orders are met and the company begins shipping out newly placed orders.

Purism is a social purpose corporation that’s been selling hardware designed to emphasize security, privacy, and software freedom for a number of years. The company started with laptops that ship with a GNU/Linux distribution called PureOS, and over time added features like kill switches that would let users physically disconnect the camera, mic, and wireless hardware when it’s not in use.

The company carried the same ethos over to the Librem 5, which was first announced in 2017. The phone has hardware kill switches and ships with a version of PureOS that’s been optimized for phones – although users will be free to replace the operating system.

Purism isn’t the first company to ship a modern smartphone designed to run GNU/Linux software. The PinePhone hit the market sooner, and at a much lower price point – Pine64 sells its phones for $149 and up.

But the Librem 5 has a faster processor, a larger battery, and perhaps most importantly, it comes from a company that helped create the modern Linux smartphone space.

Purism created the phosh “phone shell” user interface that’s one of the three main desktop environments for Linux smartphones (the others being Lomiri and Plasma Mobile). Purism has developed a suite of apps and services designed to bring Linux to phones, including the phosh user interface, phoc Wayland compositor, squeekboard keyboard, chatty SMS and XMPP chat app, and many other tools… some of which are used by other Linux smartphone operating systems.

Here’s a run-down of the key specs for the Librem 5.

Librem 5
Display5.7 inch
1440 x 720 pixel
IPS LCD
ProcessorNXP i.MX8M Quad
4 x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores @ 1.5 GHz
Vivante GC7000Lite GPU
RAM3GB
Storage32GB eMMC
microSD
WirelessWiFi 4 (dual-band)
Bluetooth 4.0
GPS (Teseo LIV3F GNSS)
4G LTE (Broadmobi BM818 or Gemalto PLS8)
PortsUSB-C 3.0
3.5mm audio
Smartcard
Cameras13MP rear
8MP front
Battery4,500 mAh (removable)
Sensors Accelerometer
Gyroscope
Proximity
Compass/Magnetometer
Ambient Light
ButtonsPower
Volume
Hardware kill switchesWiFi/Bluetooth
Cellular Baseband
Cameras/Mic
(Turn off all three to also disable IMU+compass, GNSS, ambient light, and proximity sensors)
Dimensions153 x 75 x 15.5mm
Weight263 grams
Price$799

The Librem 5 also supports convergence – you can connect the phone to an external display, mouse, and keyboard and use it to run desktop Linux applications on a large screen for video editing or other tasks that would be difficult on a phone-sized screen.

Keep in mind that while a Librem 5 will be able to run thousands of desktop apps, the selection of phone-friendly Linux apps is still rather small compared to the Android or iOS ecosystems. And the overall state of Linux phone software as of late 2020 can be generously described as a work in progress that’s still pretty rough around the edges.

But now that the PinePhone will have a bit more company in the Linux phone space, we could see the pace of third-party software development pick up. Purism is also committed to porting some popular apps to run on the Librem 5. The company’s Fund Your App page asks folks to vote (and donate) for the apps they’d most like to see brought to the phone through native apps, emulation, web app containers, or cloud-based emulation.

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5 replies on “Purism’s Librem 5 Linux smartphone is now shipping”

  1. Early backer here who did not receive a phone. Funded the kickstarter in September and I got an email the last week of January saying it was “estimated” that I’d get a phone in March 2021. Which is bullocks considering they’ve missed every estimated delivery since January 2019. Purism also reneged on their return policy two years ago–and are now saying, that they will refund around the same time they get around to shipping–which for those of us without blogs to date has been never.

    Please do not pre-order their phones or enable these dodgy business practices. If pine phones are still available, I’m going to try ordering one of those–at least that group is honest about what you’re getting and what to expect. Purism killed my faith in crowdfunding.

  2. Some minor quibbles about the article.
    The three main mobile desktop environments are Phosh, Ubuntu Touch and Plasma Mobile. Lomiri (formerly called Unity8) can be used on a phone because it is adaptive, but it is generally used on a full desktop screen, so I wouldn’t call it a mobile interface.

    The Purism says that it will be able to accurately predict when it will reach shipping parity by mid-Q1, not that it will have reached shipping parity by mid-Q1.

    In the table of specs, change “NXP i.MX8M” to “NXP i.MX 8M Quad”. Change “4G LTE (Gemalto PLS8)” to “4G LTE (Broadmobi BM818 or Thales Cinteron PLS8)”. Change “Barometer” to “Magnetometer” and “Accelerator” to “Accelerometer”. Change “150 x 75 x 15.5mm (Aspen Batch)” to “153 x 75 x 15.5mm”. Change the price from $749 to $799. Add “Weight: 263 grams”.

    The RS9116 supports Bluetooth 5.0, but only Bluetooth 4 has been verified to work. I know “WiFi 4” is the new terminology, but I think it is clearer to most people to say “WiFi 802.11n”.

    1. Thanks,

      I created the spec table before the final dimensions and weight had been revealed and when the pre-order price was still $749, and forgot to update it. Accelerator was just a silly typo 🙂

      Thanks for the corrections and context. I’ve made some of the changes you recommended, but the Pine64 website still says Gemalto, not Thales Cinteron, and Bluetooth 4, so I’m going to stick with those for now.

      As for Lomiri vs Ubuntu Touch, the former is a UI and the latter is an operating system. Some other operating systems including Manjaro have already started to release builds with Lomiri:

      https://osdn.net/projects/manjaro-arm/storage/pinephone/

      1. I assumed that Ubuntu Touch was pieces on top of Lomiri, but when I checked UBport’s description of Lomiri, I was see that you are right about the difference between the two.

        In the spec table, it is confusing to have both “compass” and “magnetometer” listed as separate sensors. I recommend saying “compass (magnetometer)” to avoid confusion, because the compass is provided by the magnetometer in the ST LSM9DS1 (https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/DM00103319.pdf).
        See:
        https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-phones/6827
        https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Hardware/Librem-5-component-list

        The Gemalto PLS8 was renamed as the “Thales Cinterion PLS8” in April 2019. See: https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/iot/iot-connectivity/products/iot-products/pls8-e-high-speed

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