Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
Less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years sounds like most video games now.
Early access phones!
The phone is great and things can be replaced easily. My only issue with the phone is it’s price. It’s quite high compared to phones with similar specs.
Yea that’s what happens if the company at least tries to make it repairable and not made by exploited people.
It’s because they try to ethically source as much of the phone as possible, and go out of their way to pay fair wages and ensure no forced labour is used in the supply chain.
Unfortunately that adds significant cost.
Unfortunately that adds significant cost.
That’s not unfortunate, that’s logical. Unfortunately, other companies are allowed to exploit humans and the environment for more profit despite lower prices.
It’s amazing when you realize that modern civilization as we know it depends on numerous layers of slavery, child labor, and general worker exploitation.
Also don’t forget the “externalized” costs of massive and irreversible environmental damage!
Yeah I feel all it takes is 5% of mankind to have evil / selfish intentions, to corrupt the system
Well yeah, I mean unfortunate as in it’s unfortunate it makes it a harder buy. I’m not pissed off that it’s more ethically produced.
They only harvest from sustainable phone forests. 👍
Nokia has decent phones dirt cheap that you can repair yourself, and you can buy spare parts cheap too, and it runs completely vanilla Android, with good multi year upgrade policy.
Sadly, Nokia doesn’t support custom ROMs. But apart from that, they’re great.
At this point I don’t even know what vanilla android looks like lol. I kinda want to get a Nokia
Yeah. Buy Nokia.
Let’s also support European companies over Chinese ones.
Except Nokia isn’t European anymore since Microsoft ruined them and sold the brand to the Chinese company HMD Global. You’re welcome.
Not only is HMD Global not Chinese, they’re actually the same Finnish company that people think of as “Nokia”. Nokia do a lot more than just phones and they sold their mobile phone arm to Microsoft, who then spun it off as it’s own company called HMD who licensed the Nokia name.
If you want to buy from a European brand, HMD/Nokia are worth considering.
I thought hmd was based in Finland?
Yeah that guy is full of shit, their HQ is in Espoo, I’ve been there.
they started manufacturing a specific model in the EU, though much more expensive.
You are wrong. HMD is a Finnish company, not Chinese. Apparently it is largely made up of former Nokia employees.
If you’re going to be a smart-arse and say things like “you’re welcome”, maybe you should check the facts first.
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S24U comes with 256GB, not 128
No offence but I don’t think this phone will be any good in a few years because of the CPU choice.
If it’s already sluggish now, what will it be like in 5 years? Unusable.
I’m typing this from a smartphone with Snapdragon 765g, a basically older version of the 778g. The 778g is better in every way compared to the many years older 765g and my phone does not feel sluggish in any way for my use cases: messaging, phone calls, video calls, media consumption, but no gaming. For me the 778g would be the perfect chip (like the 765g was): a perfect compromise between battery life, capabilities and price.
It’s not about the processor, it’s about the official software support. Some people don’t want to have to flash a custom ROM to get decent performance, some people want good performance out of the box from the official software
How is the CPU choice and official software support related? Genuine question, I don’t follow smartphone tech news, I just look up stuff whenever I or someone in my family needs a new phone.
The comment I was replying to said that this Fairphone was going to be sluggish because of the CPU choice, with which I disagreed because I’m basically using an older CPU from that CPU family without issues, so I know that it doesn’t have to be sluggish. Not in a Fairphone though, but in a Motorola edge, so the software will indeed be different.
sometimes a phone with a good CPU performs poorly because of poorly optimized software
Often people on the internet will respond to that “well just find a custom ROM and a custom kernel, flash that and it’ll be butter smooth!”
So I was assuming that you were implying that “only the CPU spec matters because you can always flash any software” and to that I respond that maybe some people don’t want to flash aftermarket software
I have a phone with 732G, it’s already super smooth on my phone with the official OS and it still has perfect software support. A newer snapdragon wouldn’t have much issues.
Offtopic:
(MediaTek on the other hand is actual and absolute garbage. Don't look at their (probably cheated) benchmarks, they provide absolutely no proper support for their chips. There is a reason why anybody who wants to do custom ROMs or android development tries to get an snapdragon.)
I’m writing this comment on a Fairphone 5 right now and it doesn’t feel sluggish at all.
It doesn’t seem to me like the increased performance of phones has had much effect on the actual experience for a while if gaming or content creation is not done on the phone. As a daily driver I think this phone will last me a while.
I mostly can’t get over paying more for worse specs. It doesn’t have to feel bad now but with 8 years of support it could very easily not feel good in the future. It’s a $760 phone that benchmarks close to the Samsung A54 a $400 phone.
The selling point is the ethical value of the phone but it’ll never top how much waste buying a used phone saves.
Backmarket FTW
Other phones can be much cheaper because they don’t care about slavery or child labor in their production line and don’t support their phones that long
But iPhones get long support, pixels now get 7, and S24 get 7.
Fairphone themselves even admits they can’t fix everything in production so a phone that was about to be waste is more fair.
If they built their phones in Germany or something I could accept the price but they’re made in China where labor standards aren’t exactly great.
Yes they are obviously not perfect but they are at least trying to change something, while the massive cooperations just dont acknowledge that problem at all.
And the updates thing: Apple controls the ecosystem and are a huge company. They dont have to worry about manufactures for a processor or other parts not supporting it longer and stop giving it driver updates. Same with Samsung and especially Google. They are huge companies that can basically do what they want. They will be able to get a hold of drivers and firmware because they are a huge customer to the manufactures. And they only just started promising those long updates. Meanwhile Fairphone has been trying for years to support their devices that long and had to struggle because they are not a massive cooperation that can influence manufactures like that to the point they now dont use normal consumer grade chips but ones with extended support.
Do they pay you to “yeah but” for them or are you just a simp?
Eh nope. Just stating facts that’s all
Thanks, now let me buy expensive components specifically for the phone
for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone
laughs in Fairphone 3
Maybe the best part of the FP5 that is talked about little is that the main SoC is not a consumer grade Qualcomm chip, but an industrial grade one that will get driver and firmware upgrades for a much longer time than the consumer ones.
In addition it is fairly similar to other slightly older Qualcomm chips that already have main-line Linux kernel support, so the prospects of running Mobian or PostmarketOS on it are quite good.
Headphone jack?
According to the article, nope. Same as the Fairphone 4.
Yeah I’m aware, that’s why I said that.
It would be badass if they could add a headphone jack through OTA updates.
The FairPhone 4 had a screen brightness bug that made the phone (mostly) unusable outside in the sun that lasted from Feb 2023 to Oct 2023.
Since the Android 12 update, the FP4 has a cooling feature that reduces the maximum brightness even when the slider is all the way to the right.
This occurs when the phone heats up to ~40 degrees at the CPU, which is not a lot at all.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/random-screen-dimming-while-brightness-slider-stays-at-100-after-a12-update/93195They will have to work very hard to make me consider buying my next phone from them.
They do seem to listen to their users and learn from their mistakes though - FP4 was often criticized for the short firmware support offered from Qualcomm. FP5 will have Qualcomm’s extended 8 year firmware support for its SoC.Fairphone 4 running lineageos, have never had this happen :/
Yeah, running custom roms means you wouldn’t have been affected.
That title sounds like what you’d say running a Kickstarter scam… yeah sure its not good yet but if enough people keep preordering our not complete product eventually it will be good.
The Framework laptop seems to be doing well. Makes sense that if no one buys it it will fail. That’s just how business works. I just hope enough people are fed up with current popular business practices to make these mainstream too.
Yeah, but given that this is the fair phone 5, they at least get partial credit in my book
- extremely slow updates
- incomplete updates as component lifespan is shorter than advertized
Yeah, its about what comes in the Future
Don’t forget the fact they manufactured it in an oppressive authorization regime, where the sales tax goes to fund over 1 million Uighurs being held in literal concentration camps.
If you want something manufactured in a country that isn’t commiting human rights violations then you are not going to find it (not even the US, which is also funding a genocide right now)
They are making an effort though. Every other manufacturer also produces in China. Fairphone at least pays the workers better and tries to make the supply chain as ethical as possible.
No the don’t. Samsung, for example, is almost all Made in Vietnam.
The Korean OEM has fully invested in Vietnam to reduce costs. I wish other OEMs ranging from Europe to India should invest in Vietnam.
They make the problem of their supply chain clear. And still, it is probably the most “fair” phone you can get, so I dont understand the critizism really.
Why arent you criticizing all the other manufacturers, that dont even try to do anything positive? Its always the small companies, that try to improve on things and then get shitted over for not going all the way. I dont understand it…
Because there are some other manufacturers, e.g. Samsung, which don’t manufacture in China (for the most part), and IMO the problem of centralizing the world’s supply chain in China is more important than what Fairphone is trying to do.
I don’t understand how manufacturing in Korea is better than China. Hell, I’d call that pretty centralized still because it still relies on the same logistical problems.
Google sure is creating a lot of Pixel-fanboys by instilling this myth that if you dont get daddy google’s precious over-the-air updates delivered to your phone in 30 seconds after their release your phone might be at great risk®™ (exactly like if you dont let google play store scan the apps on your device to look for malicious software, like F-Droid, a common known attack vector).
Because surely Fairphone users are all government officials with nuclear codes and Kim Jong-un’s nudes saved in their notes and teams of indian hackers are 24/7 waiting for a security update to release, so they can unpack the zero-day-vulnerabilities before fairphone gets their release-cycle
Can you please elaborate further on this “component lifespan” thing? Because I think they were quite clear on the processor life cycle.
Not all components included will get security updates for as long as their OS will.
Agree that instant updates are not essential for many people, but you dont need 0days to abuse publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
What components are you talking about? Can you provide some sort of source or reference or something? Are you maybe talking about the data modem?
Yes a lot of parts. The Kernel is made for that specific SOC and may not get updated.
Then you have various parts like the modem are made by Samsung, Broadcomm etc. and need their firmware updates.
Its mediocre camera is a deal breaker for me. Camera is the most important phone feature to me
For me the price is the biggest limiting factor, that and it doesn’t work around here anyway. it has almost Flagship level price for just a little bit better specs than your everyday $300 phone that you can buy off the shelf.
Why are you posting an article from september 2023?
I’m in the market for a phone and love this idea, but 8x digital zoom without optical zoom options in 2024 is a non-starter for me.
So “Occasionally sluggish performance” now at launch? Surely it won’t be much better 5 years from now
