Topics include

Docked Mode
Processing Power
Cell Coverage in the USA
Battery Life
State of the Software
Camera

Links

Furi Labs FLX1
Furi Labs on Mastodon
Furi Labs on Telegram

Summary

The FLX1 has much better specifications then my Librem5 making it faster, longer battery life, better pictures, etc. The Librem 5 is still the winner for me because of the FLX1 having a modem that doesn’t work well in the USA. The software is still a work in progress.

If they ever offer a model with a modem that works well in the USA I’ll likely purchase one.


Here you can see the FLX1, on the left, is physically larger then the Librem5.

Docked Mode

I didn’t do any testing but was told there is no support for an external display. This is OK for me as I would want it for a phone mostly anyhow but it should be noted if you are thinking of making a purchase. Docked mode is something the other Linux phones I have messed with can do. (pinephone, Librem5)

Processor Power

A fun test I always like to do on a processor is to calculate PI to 4000 places and see how long that takes. It doesn’t tell a full story but it is informative. A summary would be that the FLX1 is way faster.

Here on my Librem 5. I pick one of the four cores. I don’t think I need to as they are all the same.

purism@pureos:~$ taskset -c 3 bash -c "time echo 'scale=4000;a(1)*4' | bc -l > /dev/null"
real    0m36.805s
user    0m36.793s
sys     0m0.005s

#Now on the FLX1. First on a fast core, then a slow one.

root@FuriPhoneFLX1:~# taskset -c 6 bash -c "time echo 'scale=4000;a(1)*4' | bc -l > /dev/null"
real    0m16.428s
user    0m16.420s
sys     0m0.000s
root@FuriPhoneFLX1:~# taskset -c 0 bash -c "time echo 'scale=4000;a(1)*4' | bc -l > /dev/null"
real    0m41.158s
user    0m41.142s
sys     0m0.009s

Cellular Service in the USA

Its crap. Let me explain. You can follow this link to see how the modem in this device fairs in the USA.
Compatibility of the FLX1 modem in the USA
I have T-Mobile and work in Portland, Maine, USA. I can get nearly zero coverage with the exception of the phone saying ‘2.75G’ which I’m told is 2G on steroids.

Even with this 2.75G coverage its spotty in Portland. Driving home and the situation was very bad. I would freqently have no coverage at all. At my house nothing. This is really bad considering both my wife with AT&T and myself with T-Moble have excellent signal strengths. You may notice the Librem5 in the picture above is 4 out of 5 bars.

A little digging shows that there is no 2G or 5G service in my area.
Cellmapper.net
Since there is only 4G and not on a band that works with the FLX1, I am out of luck. I have ordered a verizon SIM for testing but my expectations are pretty low. Hopefully I can get 5G in Portland but suspect I will still get nothing at home.

Furi Labs is looking into what it will take to get coverage in the USA. Likely a USA specific model, less likely a modem firmware change.

Battery Life

Nothing but good news to report here. It seems to last for a couple days without issues. Perhaps partly because I don’t keep a SIM card in the device, not sure. When the screen blanks it uses something called ??batman?? to turn off cpu cores. It keeps just core 7, one of the fast cores running.

It doesn’t go into sleep so you continue to get notifications from all applications. This is awesome. To get more then about 5 hours from the Librem5 I have to let it sleep. When the L5 is sleeping only a phone call or text will wake it up. I tend to not let it sleep and just keep in plugged in whenever I can. The FLX1 is a clear winner for battery life.

State of the software

This phone is very new and its software is in a rapid state of development. Many issues mentioned here may already be fixed.
Firefox was crashing but I was given the fix for it. Seems to have to do with accelerated graphics. I believe the command I was given disabled OpenGL but this phone is powerful enough it still worked quite well.

When I had ‘2.75G’ service I was able to make calls and receive simple SMS messages. MMS did not work. I started looking into that but was told by helpful Furi Labs people on Telegram chat to just wait, I would have working MMS very soon.

Speaking of audio devices. Since the phone modem was such an issue I proceeded to try and setup a SIP account. With the applications I tried I could hear the remote end fine but could not be heard. When I asked Furi they said they are aware of audio issues that should be sorted out with the next release.

I was able to connect my Nextcloud account at murena.io but.. Everything synced in OK but the calendar changes made on the FLX1 didn’t reflect back. While trying to test output audio I was trying to set calendar reminders, which I could not.

I could not make gnome-clocks alarms or timers make any sound. I have since been told I needed to ‘sudo apt install libgtk-4-media-gstreamer’ and sound would have worked.

I transferred some Linux Magazines to the device. After installing evince, so I had an application to view them, I was very impressed by the graphical performance.

Camera

I didn’t do a lot of testing here but what I did do was all good. It works and seems to work quite well. Great pictures, fast, and even video. I didn’t get audio with the video but am told that is being taken care of. The one quickly noticeable bad thing is if you keep screen rotation on, putting the camera on its side is confusing as it also rotates the image. I just turned off screen rotation when using the camera.