Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
As someone who knows a good portion of the Fairphone staff in person, and knows they have a great atmosphere and are mostly great people: Fuck you @Fairphone for leaving my perfectly working FP1 dead in the water without SW updates, and removing the spare parts for the FP2 from the store around the time my FP2 needed them (USB charging port, battery), and for making every new fairphone larger, not offering a SINGLE phone in a proper pocket size (like the FP1).
For users who can live with the tablet-size of modern smartphones: Yes, repairability and longterm support for more recent phones appears not too bad, certainly better than most competitors, but still - if you are someone like me, who treats a phone well, you can not expect to be able to find spare parts by the time wear & tear from normal use will make it necessary.
My understanding is that they alone can’t give driver updates, which is why they choose a chip for FP5 which will get supported longer. (That doesn’t explain regular software not getting updates)
I assume you looked elsewhere for Fairphone 1 parts?
You mean FP2 parts? I could have gotten them only from the Fairphone community. But I spent some time waiting for an opportunity where we would have met anyways, and I found no battery replacement, because tjat was the first component in most FP2s to fail (apart from a Display problem which was early on though and fixed under warranty)
Well you convinced me to avoid them. I use my phone’s for about a decade each.
Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all
They have literally an explanation for this on their website. You might disagree, but saying “it makes no sense”…makes no sense.
Also, they discontinued the earbuds and still no jack on FP5, so the idea that “they wanted to sell their own buds” doesn’t seem to be likely.
It makes no sense to me, their whole deal is sustainability, by removing the headphone jack it forces me to buy Bluetooth headphones that all have batteries in them and are presumably not up to Fairphone standards of sustainability.
And saying we’re just following market trends sounds like a shitty explanation to me. I have the 3, I’ll use it for as long as it works but after that no Fairphone for me.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh-7sMEDxyw
My wife has her eye on a Nokia G42, and it has both Micro SD slot and minijack. So you can use a 1TB MicroSD and laugh all the way to the bank at those who bought an S24 Ultra with 128GB 😂 🤪 😆 😜 😋
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.
- 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 manufacture it in an oppressive authoritarian regime, where the sales tax goes to fund over 1 million Uighurs being held in literal concentration camps.
Imagine if 80 years ago there were products labeled “Ethically Made in Nazi Germany”, and the marketing team said it’s important to help the individual small businesses there so that the good people can have a higher standard of living.
It’s mind boggling to me that people are falling for this.
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…
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?
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 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.
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
