FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket
Fun with a FOSS-focused Phosh fondleslab
FuriLabs offers a decent-spec smartphone that is based on Debian and can run GNOME apps in your pocket.
The FLX1 from FuriLabs is a Debian-based smartphone. It runs GNOME and the Phosh shell on top of a Debian-based Arm64 userland derived from the future Debian "Trixie," and the user-facing stack is pure FOSS with the GNOME project's mobile shell and Mozilla Firefox as your browser.
The first public showing of the FLX1 was at Red Hat's developer conference, DevConf.cz, in Brno last summer, and The Register was there and got to play with the device. Now the company has provided us with a unit for hands-on evaluation.
Compared to other Linux phones out there, this is a higher-end and more capable device. FuriLabs is a small company that works with a Chinese OEM partner. The company hasn't disclosed to us who that partner is, but we did a little digging and we think we've found an Android version of the same device – we reckon it's the same hardware as the Gigaset GX6. It's very much the sort of phone this vulture favors – a robust, IP68-compliant slab, with a headphone socket and a chunky 5,000 mAh battery, which the end user can remove and replace with nothing more than a spudger.
When we looked at the Murena One de-Googled Android smartphone a few years ago, The Reg FOSS Desk mentioned our fondness for budget Chinese smartphones. There is a big snag with these devices, though. We've bought four of them so far, and after one initial system update when you first turn it on, we've never seen their OSes get an upgrade again.
That means you're stuck with the vendor's version of Android forever unless you're lucky enough to find a third-party OS – for example, we found Cyanogenmod 13 for our PPTV King 7. Good news: it upgraded the phone from Android 5 to Android 6, and gave us full UK English localization. Bad news: the camera's focus and color balance went awry, acquiring a faint blue tinge, and the microphone only worked about a quarter of the time. Sadly, flaky hardware support like this is the kind of issue you face if you reflash a phone with third-party OS image.
This is the key area where the FLX1 is very different. Because the OS is developed with the assistance of the OEM, pretty much everything works. And because it's Debian, to update its OS you just open a terminal and type sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
in the usual way. More shell-phobic folks can just open GNOME Software, go to the Updates tab, and tap the Refresh button.
The OS is called FuriOS – pronounced "furious," according to the FAQ page – and it's based on Debian testing, but it doesn't use the Debian kernel. It runs on top of the Krypton build of kernel 4.19, and uses Halium to call Android drivers. FuriLabs CEO Bardia Moshiri was formerly involved with the Droidian project, and it looks like FuriOS inherits some Droidian genes, but it's newer than the latest stable Droidian version 100.
FuriOS stays fresh thanks to updates about once a month. We received our review unit a couple of days before Christmas, with version 13.0.0. Straight out of the (plastic-free) box, it automatically updated to 13.0.5. Since then, we got 13.0.6, and just yesterday as we write, 13.0.7. A visible change is that the GNOME Settings' System screen now reports the FuriOS version number.
We plan to return to the FLX1 and write about it again after a longer-term test. Right now, we're still getting used to it and learning new ways to do things.
The only official UI is Phosh – effectively, the touchscreen version of GNOME Shell. The look and feel is very Gnomish, which means it's quite unlike any other phone UI we've seen. Perhaps the closest we've seen is the shell of Endless OS. The application launcher is directly on the desktop, which acts as the "home screen." The usual top panel is much more useful than in desktop GNOME. Here, there's a 16 MP selfie camera punched through the screen at top left, followed by Wi-Fi and mobile signal strength indicators, a Bluetooth icon, and so on. Down from this comes a search bar. Then, if any apps are open, there's a scrolling strip of thumbnails of their windows.
The bottom half of the desktop holds the app launcher: first, a version of the GNOME favorites bar, then a four-column grid of app icons. If no apps are open, there are five rows, but if app thumbnails are showing, there's only room for four rows. It gets crowded fast. We created a bunch of folders so we didn't have to scroll so much, but this reveals two limitations. The more important is that you can't pin a folder to the favorites bar, and the less important is that it's a one-level hierarchy. Folders can't contain folders.
When you're in an app, swiping up from the bottom of the screen gets back to the main desktop. There are no equivalents of home, back, menu, or search buttons. In GNOME apps, swiping from the left edge sometimes acts as the "back" gesture, but not always. For instance, in the Settings app, pages have a "back" arrow at top left, but sub-screens such as System | About let you swipe back to the previous screen… as well as the back arrow.
It's a little inconsistent, but regular readers may have worked out that The Reg FOSS desk is not particularly fond of GNOME, or indeed of KDE for that matter. We find that inconsistencies like this are perfectly normal for GNOME generally, and they seem not to bother regular users.
As you might expect, many of the bundled apps are GNOME ones, such as Calendar, Contacts, Maps, and so on. But not all. The browser is Firefox, although sadly we couldn't get it to connect to our Mozilla Sync account. The email client is Geary and the media player is G4 Music, renamed to Gapless in FuriOS 13.0.7.
As ever, some of the GNOME apps are functionally relatively lightweight, but this means that they scale down to a mobile device well and both look and feel like a cohesive whole. We were able to insert a microSD card full of music, navigate to it in the Portfolio file manager, and play tunes without any problem, but handling external storage is rather more complicated than on Android.
It's GNOME, the whole GNOME, but it isn't nothing but GNOME. There's a stripped-out copy of Android 12 present as well, although it needn't be running all the time. There's a tick-box in Settings if you want to launch it at bootup. The Software app only manages the Linux OS and applications, and there's also a copy of the F-Droid app store. This holds FOSS Android apps, of which there aren't all that many. We also added the Aurora app store and Amazon Appstore, and that let us find some familiar apps such as Telegram and the RedReader client for Reddit.
The main launcher holds both types of application, and switching is quite seamless – but not totally. There's an option to have a shared folder in the Linux file system for Android, but there are two separate clipboards, and Android apps tend to open web pages in Android's web browser. We raised these issues with the team and they are working on it. The plan is to try to iron out existing problems and glitches first, and then try to improve the user experience, and feed changes back upstream to GNOME, Phosh et al.
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Saying that, it's very useful to have a defanged and de-Googled version of Android. It means that the FuriPhone can run thousands more apps than a pure Debian phone could, even if you have to jump some hurdles. As an example, the only way we could find to install the Signal messenger was to download the .apk
file directly, and then browse to the download in the Android page of GNOME Settings and install it from there. A bit complicated, but it worked.
As for the physical hardware, the Gigaset GX6 launched at the end of 2022, so if our identification is correct, it's not cutting-edge kit, but pretty solid. The screen is an IPS LCD that's big and bright – 6.6 inches, 1080 x 2412 pixels, with a 120 Hz refresh rate, and it's protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5.
It has a Mediatek Dimensity 900 SoC, with two 2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 cores and six 2 GHz Cortex-A55, and a Mali G68 MC4 GPU. It has 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, and as well as two nanoSIM slots there's a separate microSD slot. (The second SIM slot is not yet supported, but we're told that's coming.)
There's a 56 MP rear camera and a 2 MP macro camera, plus a user-programmable button on the left edge. There's a fingerprint scanner in the power button, which works, but not very reliably – but that's true of most budget-to-midrange phones we've tried.
Connectivity is good. We've read that early OS versions had difficulty with US frequencies, but that's resolved now. It talks 2G through to 5G, Bluetooth up to 5.2, and 802.11 A, B, G, N, and AC. It has all the sensors you might want, including a compass. FuriLabs has detailed specs on the product page, if we missed anything you want to know.
It's not a slim-and-light phone by contemporary standards. It's 171 mm tall, 82 mm wide, and a hair under 12 mm thick (6.75 x 3.25 x 0.5 inches), and 278 g (about 10 oz). Our unit is textured matte black with blingtastic gold highlights, feels tough enough not to need a case, and even has a loop for a lanyard. While quite chunky, it's curvy and doesn't look as armored as, say, the Umidigi Bison.
We connected it to a USB-C docking station, and it charged happily while using both a USB wheel mouse and a keyboard. Sadly, as we mentioned last year, it can't drive an external USB-C display, or this would be a pocketable desktop replacement. FuriLabs tells us that it's working on wireless display support, but we currently lack any suitable hardware to test that out. We generally try to avoid using NFC payments, so we didn't test it, but it's supported.
We've looked at a couple of de-Googled Android phones before – the Murena One that we mentioned earlier, and the privacy-centric Punkt MC02. The FLX1 is a different animal. It runs GNOME and real Linux apps, with Android relegated to a background container. Unlike several others we've looked at, it has a headphone socket and a replaceable battery. Its specs are comparable to these devices, in places better, and yet it's cheaper.
There are a handful of pure Linux-based phones on the market, but we haven't managed to get review samples yet. Although its software stack isn't as pure, the FLX1 is more functional. In terms of components, the FLX1 is considerably better-specified than the PinePhone Pro or Purism Librem 5, and it's cheaper too. We also hope to try out UBports, and there, the FLX1 looks competitive against the Volla X23.
The device isn't perfect. The user experience is occasionally frustrating. The onscreen keyboard works, but there's almost no customization available. It doesn't support swipe typing, which is still this vulture's favorite favorite fondleslab text-entry method, and we couldn't even find a way to permanently show the numbers row. (But you do get a row with Ctrl, Alt, Home, End, Ctrl+R and Ctrl+W when in GNOME Console.)
To be honest, any full-time Linux user is used to niggles like this, and sees such inconveniences as part of the price of OS freedom. For now, FuriLabs offers the best Linux experience we've seen on a smartphone. While the device isn't high-end, neither is the price: $550 (about £445). The bootloader is unlocked, so while FuriLabs only supports FuriOS, there's nothing to stop enterprising hackers trying to get postmarketOS running on it, or swapping the GNOME stack for Plasma Mobile or something. It's there in Debian's repositories. ®