The United States is the cradle of innovation, of that there is no doubt. Sometimes they surprise us for the better, although from time to time they do it for the worse. This is the case of the Liberty Phone, a curious device at a price that is not at all accessible and that it does not exactly have the best characteristics on the market.
This phone is promoted as a safe alternative to the iPhone. The basic idea behind its development is based on a sector of American society that understands that if something is made in China, automatically becomes controlled by your government. It has a lot of politics behind it. With that in mind, this company launches a device produced entirely in the US to cover that market segment. It is very legal, of course, but it is not an alternative to the iPhone. We tell you.
Pay 2,000 euros for a 300 phone
The Liberty Phone is a mobile device manufactured by the company “Purism” and sold for more than 2,000 euros. Taking this into account, one would think that it would come equipped with countless state-of-the-art components: The best processor available, 108MP cameras, an OLED display with 120Hz variable refresh rate, all-day battery life, and at least 1TB of storage. However, these expectations could not be further from reality.
Its screen is 5.7”, uses IPS technology and comes with a resolution of 720 x 1440 pixels. It brings 4GB of RAM and 128 storage. Its processor is a Cortex-A53. Old and low end. It gets a multi-core Geekbench score of 1638. The iPhone 14 Pro comes in at 6330.
The front camera is 8MP, and the rear —it only has one— is 13MP. In its favor it must be said that it has Bluetooth 5.3, that its side frames are quite thin and that it is made almost entirely in the US It’s not ugly at all, but it’s not the design of the year either. In general, it is a lower-middle-range device —lower than average— that sells for twice as much as an iPhone 14 Pro. The reason? Safety. Or so the company says.
Is this device safe?
Yes. But it’s not necessarily more secure than an iPhone. It uses its own operating system: PureOS, which is based on Linux, promises to be the safest in the worldbut it does so based on a series of statements that are not entirely clear, and are somewhat inaccurate.
The company makes available to the user a comparative table that lists everything that PureOS includes and that Android and iOS do not. The problem is that half of the things that are affirmed in it are not very precise, as well as vague, something that they surely have done on purpose to avoid legal problems. We leave you the table below and we comment on it.
We see that it is said that PureOS has the famous “trackers” disabled by default, and that iOS does not. However, since iOS 14, when one downloads an application on the iPhone, you receive a notification that you have to allow us to be tracked. If we do not allow it, the developer will not have the ability to do so. That is, they are disabled by default.
The next section of the table talks about “privacy protection by default”. It’s something too vague. What exactly does that mean? Nobody knows, because you can’t know, and they play with it. The truth is that Both iOS and Android are pretty good in that regard.. In fact, when one thinks of privacy and technology, an image of Cupertino usually comes to mind.
If you want to offer yourself as a safer alternative to the iPhone, you have to be able to prove it.
The next statement is exactly as vague as the previous one: “it doesn’t track you”. We saw a moment ago that trackers were disabled by default on the iPhone. So what is this? Are you talking about another type of tracking? GPS maybe. They know that what they are putting here is too imprecise, and they do it that way for that very reason. The more vague, the harder it is to sue, because they can say they meant something else and you can’t prove otherwise.
We could continue like this with all these statements, but I think that we are beginning to understand where the matter is going. Most likely they have sold very few units, if any, and It’s simply not profitable for hackers to develop a virus for this operating systembut taking into account the nature of their claims, and that they have 24 employees according to LinkedInI am quite clear that it is not more secure than iOS, which is developed by 12,000 engineers, or Android, which is developed by a similar number.
At Applesfera, if what you are looking for is a mid-range, we recommend something like an iPhone SE or even a refurbished iPhone 12, which will surely fit into your budget, and if you already want to spend more money, the iPhone 14 Pro is your best option right now. Of course, keep in mind that the iPhone 15 will be released in two months.
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