I mean of course, they never shipped big parts of their orders but got the money anyways.
That company is fucked up completely.
It’s just a shame there was all the allegations of them not honouring refunds. They would have to work very hard for me to even buy one of their products and I was originally quite keen. Pinephone delivered what I ordered. I would have much more trust for them.
I asked for a refund when they kept delaying shipment of my Librem 5. I was simply denied and that was it. They told me I could still choose to receive the phone, but I don’t want it since it’s a bad, practically useless product now.
I reported them in my country for it.
Do a chargeback on your card
I think that’s an american thing. Besides, that money is long gone since I made the purchase several years ago.
It’s a credit card/payment processor thing, i.e. ultimately it’s visa/mastercard, but it’s up to the bank to offer to individuals. It’s often available in other anglophone countries if your talk to your bank but I’m sure in some places they wouldn’t do that. But yeah, years ago is too long anyway.
Hmm yeah may depend on the country. If you paid by credit card it might be worth a shot, though. They shouldn’t be rewarded for their bad actions.
They only works within some months. People have waited on Purism for years.
It depends. I’ve heard of some credit card companies doing it for a while after. Years might be hard though :(
That’s extremely fucked up.
Allegations are real. It took them about a year to give me mine, and I only got ~60% back
I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.
Its not an integer overflow?
No. It’s a double. How else do you think he doubles his money?
I found their laptops to be potato quality and their support to be less than helpful tbh. I really wish it was different because I love the concept, but quality is not there yet.
I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.
I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.
A shady company that I had to fight tooth and nail to get my money back after literal years of false promises and moving goal posts. They’ve burned any respected reputation they had.
You managed to get your money back?! How?
Made a complaint to the California Dept of Consumer Affairs. I used the way back machine to show at the I purchased the phone, their policy was “full refund, no questions asked” which they silently changed a few years later and then hide behind as an excuse to deny refunds. Turns out that’s illegal.
Well yeah, after stealing all these millions from people who ordered their phones back 1865 and still never got them and never will. Lmao. Fuck that “company”.
The contrast of the post upvotes and the negative comments is alarming .
Well I upvoted the post so that people will see the comments!
No need to kill the messenger. It’s an argument why vote counts aren’t always a good tool to judge the content.
I mean, a FOSS aligned company is profitable! 🔼
B-but it’s also Purism with all those customer horror stories and sketchy behavior. 🔽
I’m confused, okay!? 🔃
Anyone on this forum has direct experience with their products ? That can gave some honest feedback about the phone
I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.
The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don’t have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.
It’s nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.
As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get “clogged” in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.
Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.
The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.
Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.
Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It’s not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.
Thank you ! This is a great review, I don’t know if I can live with the poor battery life, but looks like it’s a promising product from your review
It certainly shows the potential for mobile Linux for sure. There’s a project https://postmarketos.org where you can install their mobile Linux OS on Android phones if you want to give it a try on a spare phone or something. The wiki lists what phones the OS can be installed on and what hardware features are working for each device.
What kind of battery life do you actually get? I can barely scrape a fully day out of my phone right now so anything similar to that is fine by me!
When the phone is not set to suspend, and mostly idle with a couple of apps running, and some occasional web browsing, its about 4 hours. Under similar conditions using suspend (meaning it will keep the modem powered and wake up the rest of the device wen receiving phone calls and SMS) then I can get through a 9 hour workday and have about 40% battery left.
I have been daily driving the phone for a couple of years so I’m sure the battery has degraded some, but I don’t know how much difference I would get with a new one. It can be easily replaced, so I may do that in the future.
The camera does not take influencer quality photos
That’s actually a selling feature.
Lol I guess this sarcastic /s
lol.
Just search for Purism customer support experiences.
I’m honestly amazed there hasn’t been a fraud, or some other consumer protection type criminal investigation.
All that baggage, and their hardware is also laughably outdated and overpriced.
Which is unfortunate, because the concept is amazing and clearly there’s a sizable market for it.
Here is an example of just ONE flavor of Purism customer experiences:
Announce current gen hardware and current pricing.
Customer pays
Customer receives hardware 5 years later, after being told approx. 362 times that cancellation refunds are down, or unable to be processed.
Customer tries to immediately return the 5 year old laptop that was just delivered and is told “No Returns”
There are other variations that you can read about on various forums.
deleted by creator
The phone is extremely low end hardware and not pleasant to use.
They’ve done great work investing in the software but its still young and incomplete.
I would buy a new one if it had significantly more powerful hardware.
That’s sad, I want a phone that runs real Linux but the options I found are either outdated hardware or alpha quality.
Yup, same, I would love to switch to a Linux/FOSS phone, but it’s all crap specs. Like this librem 5 phone. 3GB RAM and 32GB storage‽ LMAO what year is it, 2014‽
For now I’m pretty much just stuck on Pixel, one of the few remaining brands that reliably (surprisingly) let you unlock the BL. It’s even worse now since I’ve had a taste of the foldy phone and I don’t think I want to go back and that’ll probably take 15 years before ever coming to a Linux/FOSS phone, considering where they’re at now.
They’ve missed the boat entirely for me and I’m doubtful they’ll ever catch up :/
This! Exactly this! But I guess all the off the shelf parts need proprietary driver which only are available for android. No parts manufacturers will do the extra work to make them work for Linux. Only of explicit ordered that way, but then it is custom and expensive. I fear, not many will buy an expensive midrange phone, with all the trade-off linux has for most people.
No parts manufacturers will do the extra work to make them work for Linux
They just don’t want to. Now they can stop releasing security patches and users would buy new hardware.
Bought a $2,000 laptop. Broke after about 10 days of light use.
The software has improved a lot since I got the phone in 2022 (I pre ordered it in 2017)
I would be willing to use it as a daily driver if it had better battery life
As the other poster said, the camera is kind of crap, but I don’t take many pictures. At least you don’t have to manually set the exposure/balance/focus to take a picture now, though
The updater has been a little flakey and I’ve just fallen back to update via command line frequently
Fairly thick, but it feels quite sturdy to me. SD card slot and headphone jack are great. Charging speed is kind of slow
Pure Phone is not so private and secure as they claim
It may be less private than deGoogled Android right now, but in the long run Android is a dead end.
Android is a dead end for FOSS in the future, but moving from one corporate owned semi-proprietary OS to another doesn’t solve anything.
Tell us more about your opinion
I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.
Privacy-wise CalyxOS is even better in my opinion.
Tho I really want to run Linux phone.
This is something a lot of people aren’t gonna like hearing, but this is correct. CalyxOS (my choice as well), GrapheneOS, DivestOS, even LineageOS that you harden on your own, are gonna be more private and secure than the current class of Linux phones.
That’s not to say this will always be the case, I imagine that eventually a proper Linux-based mobile OS could be more private and secure. But for the near (and even foreseeable) future, a de-Googled, privacy and security centered Android ROM is going to be the much better choice.
I like my librem5 (hardware, feel etc). Software is obviously yet to catch up (from my perspective).
I just wish as a company they upgrade (forthcoming) their communication
Did ye aye
