[RandomBacon]

It doesn't look like vaporware to me. The videos and updates seem legit.

> it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps.

Have you even looked into the project?

It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there.

Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked:

https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...

[the_pwner224]

I have been following this for a while and am likely to buy it if/when it is released. Even though that will require me to change to a much more expensive cell carrier.

The software seems good. After all, it is just GNU/Linux/GNOME - all you need to do is get a C compiler and hardware drivers and then it just works. An older video did show major stutter during scrolling but that can probably be mitigated.

What's concerning is the hardware side of things. I don't think many people expected it to actually ship on the original planned release date, but the delay has been getting quite large. All the stuff on their blog is about software running on the dev kit; we have no idea what progress is like on the hardware. Turning it from that bare PCB into a phone is a lot of work.

Their marketing guy also released a video a month or two ago comparing the Librem boot time to that of an old Android phone, complete with OEM crapware. If they have nothing better to do than make such stupid comparisons, then it is hard to believe it isn't vaporware.

[RandomBacon]

I highly recommend looking into an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator).

There are inexpensive pre-paid plans that use the major cell network towers, and you get the same speeds. I recommend Straight Talk; their plans are very cheap for the data you get, but there might be other cheaper services.

I agree it's taking them a while, but I've never built a phone before, so I am cutting them slack.

I find it easy to believe that it is not vaporware. They have videos of working devices, something that can be replicated in mass, not renders etc. They've shipped dev boards.

[logicprog]

I've been following them for only a few months, sure, but I've seen that link and others, and watched many of their videos. It's extremely concerning that they use a stylus, they clearly don't have multitouch support, copy/paste is based on a control key, screen tearing is significant and some of the UIs aren't scaled properly, I haven't seen them do text selection and the keyboard didn't give feedback. That's just a few issues.

Also, the videos are legit for the software, but they are all running on the Dev Kit, not the actual phone hardware, which we haven't seen and have no idea what the progress on is like. So the hardware kinda does look like vaporware. In the link you have, for instance, the best they can do is take a fake circuit board image and fade it into a fake phone image. That's not encouraging.