Security focused laptop maker moves forward with manufacture of developer kits and other key milestones in bringing the Librem 5 to market in January 2019

SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 6, 2018 – Purism, the social purpose corporation which designs and produces popular privacy conscious hardware and software, has announced that its groundbreaking Librem 5 smartphone is currently on schedule for its planned January 2019 delivery date seven months after its crowdfunding campaign raised nearly $2.5 million for the project.

The Librem 5 will be the world’s first community-owned smartphone ecosystem that gives users complete control over their mobile device.

The company has finalized specifications for the Librem 5 hardware platform, and has placed the order to its fabricators for developer kits, which share the same base specifications as the final phone design that will be manufactured by Purism.

Significant progress has also been made to the design of the phone hardware and the development of key applications such as:

A finalized case design and UI shell

A Calls application for making normal cellular calls

A Contacts application

Starting at $599—less than the cost of many popular smartphones—the Librem 5 will give users unprecedented control and security with features unavailable on any other mainstream smartphone, including:

Native VoIP capabilities

End-to-end encryption of texts messages

Encrypted calling

Convenient preconfigured VPN services for enhanced web browsing protection

3G/4G modem

Edit or develop on the source code, which will be made publicly available

Run PureOS or most GNU+Linux distributions

Enable hardware kill switches for the camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth and baseband

Utilize a slot for an encryption smartcard such as Purism’s upcoming Librem Key developed in partnership with Nitrokey

There is increasing concern among users around personal data they give up through Android and iOS smartphones, including digital voice assistants like Apple’s Siri or Google Assistant, or even “smart home” devices like the Amazon Echo: WiFi connections, application installations, basic location services, and voice recognition capabilities managed on corporate servers have proven to be less than airtight. Purism hopes to address those concerns by manufacturing phones that will operate with free/libre and open source software within the kernel, the operating system, and all software applications. Purism has built a strong reputation within the GNU/Linux community by delivering laptops designed to specifically meet user concern about digital privacy, chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect our common rights to privacy, security, and freedom.

“The progress we’ve made over the last seven months is exciting, and it is a thrill to see the Librem 5 that much closer to getting into users’ hands,” said Todd Weaver, founder and CEO at Purism. “We have an extremely qualified team of engineers and designers building the Librem 5 according to schedule, as well as our proven manufacturing capabilities to meet our delivery goals.”

Purism is a veteran of successful crowdfunding campaigns with more than $5 million raised over the past two years and a track record of delivering on products. The company is still accepting pre-orders of the Librem 5 smartphone here: https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5.

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