Librem 5: First Impressions
<i>> The battery life seems short. I'm pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It's now 10pm and I just went to check something in Firefox and found that the battery has died already. And I haven't exactly been using it heavily. It's possible that I misunderstood how much I had charged it, but so far this is a bad sign.</i><p>Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on.  I think Apple especially puts a ton of engineering effort and coordination into making iOS and their apps work efficiently with their hardware, reducing complexity, runtime cycles, and power consumption as much as possible, on top of already highly-efficient ARM hardware.<p>Over years of doing that (kaizen), the result is optimized hardware/software fusion with industry-leading battery life.  But it seems like it takes a non-trivial amount of additional engineering time and effort to accomplish this, that will be difficult to match by smaller mobile tech startups.<p>I hope the open source community around Librem and Pine will be able to replicate that effort, but I'm not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers.  And being maximally effective at it most certainly requires the parent company to coordinate the effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.