Thoughts?
Fairphone proves the usual excuses for ending Android support aren’t valid.
That alone is worth a lot. Their endeavour for longevity is also great. I hope they get the attention they need.
By supporting the very manufacture to blame for short support times? Qualcomm is the root of the problem.
They don’t provide the bloody drivers for newer Android versions.
Manufacturers can only provide security updates after 2 major updates.
Are other Chipmakers better? It’s not like they could just have no chip at all…
Ok, than they are alright and green, very fair much phone
I bought my Fairphone 3 at the start of 2020. I love it. I love the fact I can dissamble it with the provided screwdriver in two minutes.
I love that I can buy replacement parts for it if anything breaks without having to get some kind of expensive repair from Apple or Samsung. Ive replaced the charging port on this phone and I’ll be replacing the battery soon too. Giving people the ability to fix and maintain their own devices is fantastic.
I am hoping to get a decade out of this device and I’m nearing 4 years with no complaints so far. I’m a little bit dissapointed they got rid of the headphone jack on the Fairphone 4. While you can get adapters etc, it shouldn’t be necessary imo. That alone is my biggest gripe with that device. Aside from that though, they make great devices and I highly reccomend them
The removal of the headphone jack is what made me call complete bullshit on their whole “repairability and sustainability” schtick. At the same time of the removal, they began selling their own wireless earbuds. So now you can’t use wired headphones with their phones, and instead have to buy a pair of wireless ones (which they conveniently sell to you) which will eventually have their internal batteries die and need to go to a landfill because none of it is repairable. I initially thought they were a pretty good company with decent values, but ever since they did that I no longer care about them.
Yeah that was a disappointing moment. Though I think you can still use wired headphones with an adapter that connects them to USB-C.
I disagree with this choice, but I don’t think they are bullshiting, I think they are walking a difficult line of trying to be sustainable, up to date with the technology (adding 5G this early is also very questionable IMO), attractive for consumers and not completely unaffordable, which leads to difficult compromises.
None of those points demand the removal of the headphone jack as a compromise.
Here are some: making the design easier, making reaching IP rating easier. Again, I’m not saying it would not be possible to make those with a jack, but maybe considering the aforementioned compromise, it was easier to ditch it.
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Well, when I ordered my FP4 last year the wireless earbuds were included for free. Still bought an adapter for aux that i keep in my car. I think this is fairly acceptable. Now my only problem is that they didn’t offer an adapter with both aux and USB for charging.
It’s still more waste. An adapter is a bigger use of materials, extra cost, and another point of failure. Hardly a sound decision for a self-proclaimed “sustainable” manufacturer.
Wireless is future
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This is really good to hear. The worst thing about mid range android phones is the lack of future software support. Even flagship androids aren’t anything to write home about. As much as people like shitting on apple, they support their devices for quite a while compared to other manufacturers.
Most Android manufacturers are using minimal development teams to get closed source blobs from the CPU+radios OEMs to talk to the OS. Like the article says, Qualcomm stop supporting older generations of their SoCs pretty quickly, and those manufacturers don’t invest the resources in custom development, which is the LineageOS approach that Fairphone are taking. There’s nothing to promise these updates will be stable and secure though.
Apple has a huge advantage in developing their own processors from start to finish. They’re not reliant on anyone else’s code, and if they do need to buy in certain components (like Intel modems that they’ve used before), they’ve got the size and budget to get pretty much anyone to agree to their terms. It’s why Google started the Tensor project, which is rumored to be finally going full Google (ending reliance on Samsung) from 2025/Pixel 9.
I still think that open standards would better enable long-term support than more effective vertical integration.
We need an open source smartphone.
pinephone
Would be great if it would actually be usable.
From what I’ve read from people owning it it’s unfit for any purpose at the moment and very few people actually use it as their main phone.
Pine64’s model of “we build the hardware, the community builds the software” doesn’t seem to be working very well unfortunately.
Its not even software issues (I mean the software is still very early, but improving), the pinephone hardware is ridiculously underpowered while simultaneously drawing too much power.
The Pro fixes the underpowered issue, but gives you a couple hours of screen-on time. At first I was hopeful software updates would fix the battery life, but the same operating system (postmarketos) gives me a full day of use on my other phone (oneplus6). That leads me to believe it’s largely a hardware issue.
I hope I’m wrong. \o/
Good explanation. Even if their long term support doesn’t work out it’s nice to see a trend towards long term support and reduction of e-waste.
So? Sell it and buy the new one
Believe it or not, some people aren’t big on over consumption and want things to last. Companies should do better and not produce crap that’s going to end up in landfill in a few years.
Have fun using obsolete tech
I believe someone else in this thread has mentioned this already, For most people the feature set on phones has been stagnant for many years. Most users have their use case met already and additional features are really just bloat (for the most part). Not all people are into tech, and a phone is simply a tool. And therefore don’t always want/need the latest and greatest.
Its not obsolete if they are providing the updates…
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
Tl;dr: phones = bad
His code contributions have always been high quality, and they’re audited by his peers. Its very unlikely malicious code would come from him, and even more unlikely it would make it through on to your phone.
While he’s certainly unhinged, it’s clear that he cares deeply for the project. I can’t see him doing anything intentionally malicious.
I really wish him the best, and I’m glad he stepped down. Much better for optics with him out of the way.
This might age horribly, but I never really understood the worry that a high-profile open source developer might ‘smuggle’ some dodgy code into a repo. Sure, it’s possible. Especially in large projects, but the risk/reward ratio is simply ridiculously bad and there are so many other/simpler ways out there a malicious actor could use to make a profit.
The risk is definitely not higher than the risk of some closed sorce dev smuggling something dodgy into a high profile project like e.g. Windows.
That said, I would trust an unknown git repo about as much as I would trust some exe I found on a random website.
Yup, I’m in the market for a new phone soon, and here’s my assessment of my options, in rough order of preference:
- PinePhone Pro - probably not ready since I’m not confident in calls waking it from sleep; not sure if it’ll support the apps I need (mostly need a specific 2FA app for work)
- Fairphone - expensive and no headphone jack
- Pixel + alternate ROM - not sure I trust the devs
- iPhone - don’t like the ecosystem much, and I don’t really trust Apple
- regular Android - software support ends too soon
- feature phones - don’t have the apps I need
I’m probably going to get an older Pixel and a PinePhone Pro, and I’ll hack on the PinePhone until it does what I need. I don’t think I can add reliable suspend/resume, but I can probably build a couple small apps I need (i.e. a lemmy client, I’m already working on one), get a few Android apps working, and tune the OS a bit. Worst case scenario, it’s a fun hobby project.
Owner of PinePhone(Pro), calls and alarm from sleep works.
Which distro and enviornment do you use and how is your battery experience?
I use ArchLinux with Plasma Mobile. Battery life is bad, but I bought the Pine keyboard which makes the battery life normal.
How long have you had it? Have any cracks devoloped as time has passed with the keyboard case?
PP about two years, PPP about six months. Yes, there is a small crack with the keyboard case with PPP.
I heard the original PinePhone works fine, but the Pro is still WIP. I want the extra performance from the Pro, otherwise I’d probably already have a PinePhone.
I guess I’ll find out when I get one though.
Not anymore, I have both and call and alarms from sleep works :)
Awesome, I’ll have to pick it up then. :)
Fairphone allows you to remove the battery, which, amongst other things, allows you to hard-reset the phone by just pulling the battery, which I did 2 times after owning the FP4 for 18 months. It also receives longer software support than most other phones. Negatives include a rattly top speaker above 50% volume, which was confirmed to be a design defect, the high price tag and, for me at least other small annoyances, such as the microphone volume being pretty low when on a call (not unusable, but you got to speak louder) and sometimes GPS issues, which either require patience or a restart.
An incredibly important detail of being able to remove the battery is that it enables both carrying extras for longer travel, and allows replacing and upgrading as it ages.
I have a samsung galaxy s5 and thanks to that i could straight up double the ontime with an aftermarket battery, which is comically large and came with a new backside lmao.
pinephone pro - is defintely getting better as the software improves. The battery life is definitely something that holds it back i bought a keyboard battery case and it improved it however the edges of the case that connects to the phone have cracked over time and ive super glued it twice (near headphone port & opposite side near type c port.) When they crack it can cause a misalignment on the pins and not charge/keyboard doesnt function so i have to press back into the case(hence the glue to fix that). It will eventually get better for me to completely jump over.
Pixel phones degoogled - works great especially calyx or graphene os. I have always bought used but if i want change to happen i need to stop funding google indirectly through the used market with buying their phones. I am speaking for myself here.
Fairphone , Teracube, Murena - i eventually want to just buy from these moving forward. They hit 80% + of the checkboxes i need and improvements come quicker when this companys market improves especially when their direction aligns with what i want in a phone.
Tl;dr - i am letting my money do the talking on where i want phone improvement to occur.
I think my problem is that I don’t know where I want to see improvement. I see two options:
- Linux phone - it’ll become a hobby and I’ll constantly need to tinker
- Graphene, Fairphone, etc - better than what I have, but I’ll probably never get to my ideal
If the PinePhone had better software, I’d totally just go with that, but it’ll be rough the first couple of years.
Regarding best phone for post market os
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Pinephone (not pro) seems to have the most support its on the main line.
Other than that under “community” & “phone” you would decide which phone in that list meets what you need and get peoples opinion on those specific phone with usage.
- your selection on which direction to take via pinephone or android based on your needs and tollerances.
If you dont mind tinkering go pinephone however if you need it to work for various uses based on what you/friends/family use and compromises need to be done then go android.
Contribution can be bug reports, donations, assistance to other users ect. Anything is possible if you want.
I do where i can and its my choice; same with you, your choices are your own.
I think I’ll want the PinePhone Pro because repairability is important and it’ll probably be hard to find parts for outdated mass market phones. The original PinePhone is just too slow for me (from videos, not hands-on usage), and the PinePhone Pro probably wouldn’t be a huge downgrade from my current phone in terms of performance.
I didn’t see a big selection of used OnePlus 6s (OnePlus 6T seems available though), and the ones that are available are in poor shape (shattered back, burned in screen, some kind of damage, etc), so it’s not going to be a long term option most likely. The PinePhone should have decent parts support for a few years at least.
Sounds good,
I have a pinephone pro, while you can use use it touch. I recommend either the keyboard case(since it has a battery) or having a portable bluetooth keyboard of some sort. If configurartion is needed and there are issues with the onscreen keyboard(happens when i use certain apps like bitwarden) the keyboard helps ease that issue.
I still use stock manjaro plasma but if i jump i might go to sway/plasma arch/sway postmarket still checking put options though. I know i need waydroid to work so ill see what the doc support is on both.
Oneplus6 + postmarketos
It works really, really well.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)
Any idea of what phone is best for postmarketos? I intend to use it as a daily driver and potentially submit patches for things like MMS (my family still uses it occasionally).
I guess, if money were no object, which phone offers the best postmarketos experience?
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Probably the shift6, oneplus6 (or 6t), or librem 5.
The pixel also doesn’t have a headphone jack, so the fairphone is still better in that it has an ethical supply chain, and much more user repairable
When I heard the Fairphone 4 didn’t have any waterproofing I decided to skip this version. My coworker is replacing their Samsung S10 just because the USB port is getting loose but they’re an avid boater. For some, water resistance really matters.
I would assume it’s very hard to build a phone that’s easily openable and at the same time waterproof :/
S5 was both.
Plus you could just use screws and a gasket.
I would like to support them, but it is lacking in several features. Kinda wish they would take their modular and user-replaceable components and let us upgrade, like a better camera module for example.
that said, it’s missing the most important thing… Network compatibility.
I wish they were more similar to Framework except in the smartphone space. Because when I buy a Fairphone I’m still stuck with the specs I bought and when I want to have better specs I need to buy a new phone regardless of how repairable it is. WIth a Framework laptop I can upgrade the mainboard to one with better specs and can keep the rest.
I’m so tired of phone without bezels and tiny batteries.
I really really want a phone that has like 12 screws on the back, around the edge of the device that pinch down on a gasket for the seal instead of adhesives and plastic clips. Phones are plateauing in power now where most people don’t need to upgrade the SOC or memory for the better part of 5-10 years. The only reason I ever really need to replace a phone is because the phone isn’t getting updates or the battery is cooked.
If done well enough, the screws could even allow modular backs and shells. You could mount your phone’s internals into a shell and lock it in with a different back. So people could have phones with a big ol ass on them and a big ol battery if they want. The SOC, memory, and storage could all be on one singular board with headers to all of the buttons and shit. Because it could be user serviceable you can even put the SIM card, SD card or whatever onboard and not have to deal with a water tight seal for those.
Boy do I have a phone for you!
I’m not sure the fairphone is even waterproof. Plus for what it offers it is way more costly than it needs to be. 20W charging, 3904 mAh battery, and for some reason no headphone jack.
Plus I’m American and I don’t think they even sell the thing over here but for nearly $700 it’d have to be a very convincing phone for anyone who isn’t thinking “I will fight climate change and ewaste by buying a phone” because you can buy a pixel 7a for $450 currently.
The only reason I ever really need to replace a phone is because the phone isn’t getting updates or the battery is cooked.
This solves both of your problems and means you have to buy a third as many phones.
Your example with the camera module is exactly what happened to the FP3. They released the FP3+ which featured a better camera and users of the original model could upgrade by just buying this module.
However this is definetly not the focus of Fairphone as a company as too many or regular new modules would introduce new e-waste again.
the fairphone 5 is rumored to come out this year, hopefully it will address those issues
I’m not really conviced by fairphone. They claim they have an ethical and ecological supply chain / manufacturing but there is very little on their website to support that claim. The phone is made in China like any other smartphone. The “Fairtrade Gold” label doesn’t mean Gold-rank fairtrade materials, it means that only the actual gold that’s inside the phone has the fairtrade label. The amount of gold in a phone is ridiculously small and doesn’t represent the major part of the phone’s emissions footprint. They have another label which name I can’t remember but I looked it up and the terms are very vague. After all the electronic components are still electronic components : copper wires made from copper, qualcomm CPU made in the same qualcomm factory, etc. I don’t think a label changes that.
All in all I don’t think that buying a brand new, 580 € smartphone with subpar performance is a good move if you care about the environment. Buying a used phone sounds like a much better option to me : cheaper, better performance, probably not as serviceable BUT it’s already living a second life anyways.
I tried to be enthusiatic but FP looks way too much like a cash grab aimed at people that care about the environment
You’re right that Fairphone’s supply chain is not fully sustainable. In fact, I remember reading an interview with the founder where he admitted that poor sustainability and labour practices are so entrenched in the industry that it was impossible to actually make a “fair” Fairphone. (Incidentally, this is why the company uses the word “fair*[er]*” to describe the phones.)
Yeah, I would definitely agree that a used phone is a much more environmentally-friendly choice than a brand-new one. The amount of customers who are going to ditch their 1 or 2 year old phone for this “sustainable” phone will unfortunately not be zero…
My problem with FP isn’t only that their phone lacks in features and sustainability. It’s that their whole PR and marketing is misleading. They hold back a lot of essential information to trick the customer into thinking that the phone is good for the environment. I would be more enclined to support them if they were honest about it ; right now it looks like corporate BS intended to make a maximal profit, like any other phone company
Phones are never good for environment, it’s a resource sink. But it’s better than most others and it’s enough :-)
A lot of phones are disposed of despite being perfectly functional (at least some are saved by the second hand market) just because the manufacturer released a new version with a slightly better camera sensor and more RAM. It has gotten a bit ridiculous. Fairphones are not perfect, but being able to keep them more than 2-3 years without being left with an unmaintained glued brick is what makes at least a small difference.
i’d be fine with it if they presented it like this. But they don’t, they aren’t honest about the actual (very moderate) sustainability they offer
They are a European company. If they lied about any of this, an NGO would have already bisected them since then.
They’re not literally lying, but presenting the information in a biased way
Greenwashing is the term for something like this.
Greenwashing refers to ecological sustainability claims. Regarding the manufacturing process, Fairphone primarily claims to be more socially sustainable, not environmentally. Their ecological claims are solely based off of their phones extended software support and easier repairability, which is undeniably given.
I guess having only one phone every year makes it immensely easier to support than having multiple models at every price range every year. Apple does it, why couldn’t Android phone manufacturers do it?
Because they want to corner every price target.
You think the masses care about how long the devices are supported? This is a topic from back in the early days of Android.
Also we need to consider how phone companies differ from Google and Apple. Those two also generate money off the users purchasing apps and etc, and they have the ability to push users to their services easier. Where as strictly phone manufacturers make money at the sale of the handset, so – as you put it – they’re incentivized to have as much penetration as possible by selling as many models they can.
Tho, I do think people are starting to care about support length as the phone market matures and people wait longer to buy their new phones. Which is why, I think, Android manufacturers are lengthening support (and not out of the goodness of their hearts)
Please educate me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Apple’s model of continuing to sell older flagships, or even reusing old chassis and putting flagship chips inside them cost less money in the long run? I imagine the price for manufacturing the same phone 3 or 4 years later would cut down significantly, no? And by doing that, you also won’t need to spend R&D money on extra models.
Oh indeed! That helps as well. I imagine other manufacturers do this too, but I only follow Apple closely since I was a huge fanboy half a decade ago. So I can’t speak with certainty for them
Apple does it by introducing new models while lowering the price of older ones. That effectively covers the lower budget price tier while not having to make a whole new model for it.
It’s at least getting better. Samsung, who had a much wider range of phones, moved to 4 years of security updates. Pixels moved to 5 years. Too many other brands to list their support length too. Apple still beats them though.
Google has two a year, right? One high-end, one mid-range. Supporting both is probably not much more effort than a single model.
From what I heard many Fairphone 3s didn’t even survive that long. Quality, audio quality and performance all seem to be pretty bad. That combined with its very high price point kinda defeats the point of it. The idea is great, but the execution isn’t.
I’m using a FP4, and here the signs are reversed. The hardware is working so far, but the software is incredibly buggy and instable.
Add to it the very mediocre hardware (slow, outdated SoC, terrible camera, bad battery life) and it’s not a fun phone to use. Especially not at that price point.
You can get a pretty top of the line smartphone for that price, which I’m also not willing to pay for either.
Let’s hope EU regulations can make smartphones generally a bit more sustainable.Yeah, the high price point kinda destroys the repairability aspect for me. I could get a similar phone from Samsung or Google for €200-400 less. For that money I can get the battery/screen replaced multiple times.
I hope, the EU regulation makes repairability mainstream.
If the software is a major issue, why not install a Rom like LineageOS?
Tbh, I am not convinced they run much better than stock.
Also, I do use stuff like banking apps on my phone, and I don’t want to completely lose that.
The 4 will also run calyx.
Still no ToF camera driver, but otherwise solid performance without the google bloat
terrible camera
Phone cameras quality does not really depend on hardware these days. It’s all software.
Get yourself a hacked Google Camera. Night and Day change.
I did and it is an improvement, but it can’t completely fix the bad camera.
I renewed phones late last year and I pondered on getting the FP4, but I was unhappy with the camera and even though it’s replaceable it is not upgradeable. I got instead a Pixel 6A and it’s a pleasure to use (tolerating all the Google stuff).
I have high expcetations for FP5
I am quite certain you get the better user experience with the Pixel 6A than with the FP4.
Let’s see about the FP5. The issue is that FP is just not a large manufacturer, and it shines through.
I agree wholeheartedly. Do you end up checking your e-mails for FP employee responses to the Forum posts?
I did for a while, but I gave up. Both their support and their communications on the forum is almost inexistent.
Yep, on the Forum they’re nowhere to be found, usually. I’m the reporter of the screen ghosting issue. Have you tried Support though? They offered me an RMA.
I tried their support a few times. Since the bugs are software-only, an RMA probably wouldn’t have fixed anything. They took the bugs, said they stuck them into their backlog, and then didn’t do anything about them. The bugs got swapped out for other bugs when Android 12 came around.
The biggest two bugs I had before were that the notification toggles disappeared ~1/day and I could only get them back by repeatedly changing the user on my phone. The other one was that video wouldn’t work in split screen.
With Android 12, both of them are fixed, but now my screen turns completely black whenever a new notification appears. Also my mobile data connection disappears ~1/h and only appears again if I manually toggle mobile data. Sometimes when using split screen, the phone gets completely stuck for ~30-60secs. The nav bar also sometimes just disappears. ~1/day the recents button on the navbar loses it’s function and requires me to reboot for it to start working again. GPS randomly dies as well and only works again after a reboot. That’s especially fun when you are currently using your phone for Google Maps while driving.
The navigation bar disappearing and the mobile data connection needing manual re-enablement affects me too. I don’t think anyone has posted about them on the forum yet, though.
If only CalyxOS supported the Google Play Store, I would use that.
I bought my FP3 at release in September 2019, while it does overheat from time to time and I’m on my 3rd battery (kinda the point of it), I’m very happy with the purchase overall, when it dies I’ll move on to the FP4 or 5 if it is released.
TBH, I was also surprised to see support for Android 13 was out
I’m still on my original FP3 battery (2021), although I am rooted and changed the PD charging speed to 2.5W…
What kind of torture are you doing to your device for it to overheat, damn 😳. I’ve only overheated my device once and that’s mainly because I was using it as a bike computer in hot weather 😅
First one came DoA so it got replaced by warranty, the second one became a spicy pillow less than a year ago
Going through a battery each year doesn’t really sound like the point of it though? That’s a lot of excess waste. I use my Pixel 4a for about 2 years now and the battery is still good.
Ive been using my Fairphone 3 every single day since January 2020. I did have a vibration motor wear out, but its replaceable so its fine. My battery is a bit iffy now. According to a battery scan app I use, its at 63% health. I’ll be replacing that soon too since sometimes it will only charge up to a certain point etc. Still though, on any other phone, that would be a deal breaker, but since I can order a replacemt battery for like 25€, its not an issue.
Only other issue I have is sometimes the screen experiences ghost touches, where it will register a touch on the screen even when I’m not using it. Again, this will be fixed with a replacement later on.
I love my Fairphone and I strongly reccomend it for its repairablity alone. The sustainability and FairTrade aspects are just a bonus IMO.
I’ve had my FP3 for the same amount of time, still on all original components. Battery lasts through the day easy. The camera is bad, so I might replace that for the upgrade, but other than that I have no issues. My partner buys fancy phones and he is on his third phone in the same timeframe because they all broke. Shame your FP3 is not holding out as well as mine!
If you had gotten a high quality phone from another manufacturer it is unlikely you would have had this many hardware problems requiring a replacement. This seems like a toss up.
I had the Fairphone 2 and I loved it. It was like Lemmy, you never really knew if it would work the next morning but the community was great.
After replacing the battery once, without any tools whatsoever, and upgrading the camera, with a small screwdriver, it lasted for more than five years.
Since then, I’ve had a company phone but when it breaks, I will check out Fairphone first. Of course there is no such thing as a sustainable, or “fair” phone, but at least in 2016, this was often discussed in their trancparacy reports? The official forum was also very aware. Some raw materials where sourced to the exact mine, others thei openly said they couldn’t control at the time.
Additionally, they offered the phone with root acces so trying out alternative os was never any problem. It’s the closest Ive ever been to a Google free life.
for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc
their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that’s not feasible or desirable to the vast majority
imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things… that’s a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour
For me the problem is the SoC they chose was too slow to be viable in 2018, let alone today.
“Too slow to be viable” is a bit strong. I’ve had a fairphone 4 for at least a year now and I’ve had no issues.
I want these people to try living with an ancient galaxy s5 for a couple months, browsing the web is borderline physically painful, it gets so hot that touching the screen almost burns you, and it has so little RAM that it struggles to keep two apps active at once.
Literally if i have music playing and i open the browser it usually kills the music in the background.
my current phone has the same soc and there are absolutely no issues there. will report back once i get my fairphone 4, hopefully tomorrow
if you’re not gaming on your phone (and if you are, 1. why, 2. get a steamdeck), i honestly don’t see how you would notice the soc. the only time i ever noticed that my phone was weak in the past five years (and my current phone is the only one that was low-mid-range, not actual low-end, save for an iphone se 3rd gen i had for half a year) was during zooming into an abnormally large upscaled r/place image. a phone’s performance is not really something that should be a consideration for the average user nowadays, anything can run basic apps that should have been websites and play back video. the mid-tier 2021 soc in the fairphone 4 definitely qualifies.
if the complaint is about the fairphone 3, then absolutely fair, i do remember that that one did manage to be hella slow. i wanted one back then and it was one of the major issues.
- I’m gaming in moonlight so it needs a good decoder
- I’m way too poor for a steam deck
Slide in a 3 here just cause termux x11 + box64droid is really coming along well and I want to be able to play all my games in my phone lol. Especially cause where I work has a lot of down time, but obviously not room for a full pc
I’m gaming in moonlight so it needs a good decoder
Almost any modern SoC can decode 1080p60 HEVC in real-time. That part is handled in dedicated hardware; the speed of the CPU or GPU next to it does not matter.
Thank God I referred to that dedicated hardware by name eh? Did some research and the fair phone supports hvec at 8 bit, not 10.
Personally that looks a bit washed out, and the battery wouldn’t hold up too well - so it’d be a pass for me
Edit: the fair phone 4 would fair (lol) a lot better though
You did not specify that you need a 10-bit capable decoder. Given that the screen is 8-bit, that would be kind of unusual to have outside of niche applications such as this one.
8 vs. 10 bit shouldn’t make the image look better outside of toning down banding artefacts. There might be an indirect colour transformation taking place here.
I do some light nuisance games on my phone, but I absolutely can tell the difference between the 888 in my phone and a 865, let alone the thing in the fairphone.
Sure, I’m spoiled, but I am not willing to give up 120hz at 120fps in my apps and instant loading in the ui nor will I ever get anything but oled again.
If you’re asking for a 5+ year commitment to the device, which is kind of what this repairability thing does, you either have to be at the leading edge or have an upgrade path.
Fairphone has neither, they’re starting at 2 years behind but want me to pay as if they’re a modern midrange.
i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it’s not competitive spec-wise, but it’s what they have to do to keep up their model. they’re not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you’re ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.
the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you’d likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.
from what i’ve seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they’d need over the same period of time.
I don’t see myself doing anything with my s21 other than a new battery in another year.
My problem isn’t necessarily the price being so high, it’s that the performance is just trash for that price. The repairability for a phone in that performance class is OK. In my mind I compare it to an A6 in performance which comes with amoled screen and there’s enough parts on the market to rebuild it forever. The only advantage fairphone has is that there’s no glue on the back panel there’s thousands of A9s already manufactured.
And the A6 costs < $100 on the used market with a new battery.
IMHO fairphone is making e-waste by making more already obsolete phones and taking advantage of people’s desire to think they’re saving the world by using a repairable phone when getting something of better quality/performance from the used market is actually better for the environment.
Updates on a phone is a important topic. When i choose a smartphone i look for software support period. But i think software updates sometimes make graphical improvements and that causes performance decrease. Or the company wants to slow that thing down. Nowadays you can’t see the difference.
I want to love my FP3 but it loves to crap out by being slow or just crash prone. I replaced my camera because it accumulated dust behind the lense, because it is replacable.
… still wouldn’t buy any other phone, it works well enough in all aspects and is a bit like the slightly crappy car you still love <3 Next one will be a FP5 :)
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room. The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::… Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015. Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android. Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
I’m still in mourning over the Ubuntu phone OS :(
Yup. While I have a sceptical opinion of Ubuntu, it did find it sad that it didn’t gain any traction. A possible contender is still Tizen OS. It’s essentially an entire OS build around Chromium, while not owned by Google. Samsung use that a lot in their smart TVs.
Sure, it’s not as performant as running native Android.
But boy have we seen some massive improvements in browser tech and performance increases on mobile devices. Developing web-applications is certainly a ton easier than native Android and IOS. Wrapper toolchains like React Native aren’t helping much.
Unless you really need calls to some device APIs, there isn’t too much left that a Browser can’t do compared to what the native OS permits. I’ve been developing web-apps for robots and also developed equivalent native apps in Android. In the browser you now have access to some impressive 3d capabilities, which are extending further (BabylonJS). You’ve got the ability to interact with files via tool-chains that are not too dissimilar to what you see in native Android (Google has been clamping down file-system access to app devs quite heavily in recent releases). You can also gain decent API access to the devices battery and GPS status. Add some nifty UI libraries and you can provide a more pleasant experience, faster than with an actual native app. Even video streaming works remarkably well since you can interact with multiple cameras, microphones and even the screen (Google Meet does that).
It’s now that we’re seeing PWAs (progressive web app) to gain traction. I’m using Voyager for Lemmy, which works lovely in Windows and my phone.
In the browser you only miss on some native capabilities on some hardware component and a few legacy systems. Mainly serial communication and native UDP support. Although the last one will see some more improvements with HTTP3, which is gaining traction.
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!
i use e/os, that replaces like everything google has like the google micro services with something else. Some apps, newer ones with more trackers, tend to break but it supports some phones from 2013. I suggest taking a look when you have phones that are not supported anymore
It seems to support Sony Xperia Z3
https://doc.e.foundation/devices
It is a valid reason from the OEMs because they have to rely on their chip manufacturers for security updates. It’s literally out of their control to do updates that long except when it comes to the OS.
It’s nice. For me.
I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone though. People who know how to handle the issues (i.e. how to replace the stock OS - it sucks, but /e/OS is okay) don’t need my recommendation.
For most people it’s just a pretty expensive mid-range-specced phone.
