Looks like a new model for the Fairphone has been announced! What do you think about it?
Personally I love the fairphone project but after having tried GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6a it would be hard to move to a different OS
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JerryRigEverything already tested it and I’m impressed.
Just saw it. Wow. This device reminds me of my Framework.
Thanks for the heads up. I too am impressed.
As the owner of an FP4, I will not get any further FP products.
The hardware is mostly fine, but it’s also meh. The speaker sucks, the microphone sucks, the camera sucks. Just talking to people on the phone is a pain, since people just can’t understand me.
But worse is the software. Updates are slow (still no Android 13 on the FP4) and terribly buggy. Each update brings new bugs with it, old bugs are resolved only very slowly. One example of this is that some devices experience ghost touches. So in the newest update, they just lowered the sensitivity, so that the devices that didn’t have ghost touches before now often don’t register touch at all. On the forums there is a long list of known bugs. The weird thing here is that every user seems to get a random grab bag of bugs.
And lastly: There is the price. It’s so incredibly expensive, that it basically invalidates any benefit you get from the repairability. If I buy a comparable phone for ~€400 less, I can use that money to get the battery and screen professionally replaced a few times.
So all in all, I am really not happy with the FP4, and this will most likely be my last Fairphone, unless Fairphone will finally migrate their software development to an in-house team where the devs actually use the phone themselves. Software QA is so terrible, that I can’t imagine anyone at Fairphone actually using the phone themselves.
You could look into CalyxOS. I don’t know if you’d consider installing an alternative System on your phone, but the FP4 is one of the few ones that let you unlock and relock the bootloader. Mine has been on Android 13 for a while now with very few software issues.
Newbiwe here, do you need to flash rom every time CalyxOS receives an update?
Not at all. It has OTA updates that download and install automatically in the background, and apply on the next reboot.
I honestly wonder why people suggest all these weird lineage spinoffs instead of the real thing… oh well
Well when you install CalyxOS you can relock the bootloader afterwards, it comes with microg, which vanilla Lineage dodn’t support at all last time I checked, and it comes with a firewall app as well. So, different focus than Lineage I’d say.
There definitely are bugs. But to be fair, for every phone I ever owned the forum looked the same: so many people complaining about so many different problems/bugs/hardware issues that you question why you even bought the phone in the first place. Most often the average user is perfectly fine but would never open up a forum post to announce this.
In terms of the price, to be fair, it’s supposed to last like 8 years. You’re basically buying your next phone too when you buy one of these. It’s also more expensive to do what they’re doing.
The Fairphone is always just such an odd decision for me. On one hand, I would love to have a phone with long support and swappable parts. On the other hand, I hear so many complaints about the software and wait for major version updates that I am not enterily sure if it really is a good buy.
The price is pretty okay, a bit less than 100€ per expected usable year. This is in line with other manufacturers. Also, the biggest bull of the expenses probably comes from the way the manufacturing and materials are checked.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Or maybe there will be less issues this time? From what I heard some of the problems where caused by Qualcomms support windows being closed and the company actually updating everything themself. Which might be solved by using a SoC with somewhat decent support now.
the biggest bull of the expenses probably comes from the way the manufacturing and materials are checked.
Could you expand on this? I am unfamiliar with Fairphone’s methods for determining and checking sources for materials and manufacturing. Is it flawed?
As far as I know, Fairphone uses “conflict free” materials. This is more expensive and harder to get than just searching for the cheapest seller of any material (e.g. lithium) and just going with them. In theory this should help against child or prison labor.
Additionally, they aim to pay everyone in the chain a living wage. Which is also more expensive than just using foxxcon to produce as cheap as possible and telling them to “just add more suicide prevention nets”.
This is a good thing, but makes cost go up quite a bit I would assume. Additionally, the SoC is probably more expensive than the Snapdragon equivalent, as it is build “for industrial uses”, which normally commands a premium.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Custom ROM will help with some issues, but not all. If the issue is in a proprietary blob, like the random screen dimming issue that’s plagued FP4 for months now, you’d still be stuck with the issue.
Looks preety good, i think i’ll have to swim to Europe to get one…
It’s only IP55, so good luck on your swim back.
No headphone jack. I really wish they’d bring that back.
8 years support
Wow. I wonder if they have a contract with Qualcomm for that.
No, what they did was pick an SoC called QCM6490 which is used for embedded and industrial applications, and Qualcomm officially supports those for 8 years, unlike the snapdragon SoCs. According to gsmarena it should have performance similar to a snapdragon 778G.
Yeah, just read about it. That said Qualcomm’s part of the support is said to be 5 years by Ron at Ars:
Let’s talk about that industry-leading 8–10 years of Android support, which doesn’t necessarily mean 8–10 major OS updates. For now, Fairphone is promising “at least five operating system upgrades” because that is how long its weird Qualcomm chipset will officially be supported. Fairphone says Qualcomm will support that chip “until 2028” and after that, “Fairphone commits to extend support until 2031 and is aiming for 2033, giving users a total of eight to ten years of software support.”
According to Fairphone “We plan at least 5 Android OS version updates after Android 13”.
5 years is good, but not exceptional. And security fixes is way more fuzzy topic.
What’s the deal with phones never having a 16:9 aspect ratio anymore?
I suspect that if you were to cut the screen at the rounded edges, the sensor island and the onscreen nav buttons you’ll be left with a 16:9 screen.
In other words its a 16:9 screen with some margin for curves and controls.
Is there an SD slot?
I just read the specs and there is an SD slot.
I’m not sure but it seems there isn’t…
Yes, it does have a microSD card slot. The website isn’t the most clear website ever, but if you click on “Specifications” and then “See all specifications” everything will be shown, including a MicroSD card slot
Just out of curiosity what would you use/need it for?
…storage?
O rly?
Duh, penile storage that is
I’m guessing they mean microSD and would like to use it for additional storage
I have a 512GB microSD card in my current phone that is about half full. I don’t have any interest in paying a subscription to store my stuff on someone else’s server (“the cloud”), when the SD card only cost me a couple of months of what a subscription would. I periodically back up the SD card at home.
As to what’s on it? The usual stuff like pictures and videos, but also game ROMs, call recordings, shows/movies, ISOs, utilities (I can make my phone appear to be a flash drive, bootable even). I also backup my texts and other records using a third party app. When I do have to swap phones, transferring the SD card over and then restoring stuff like settings, messages, records, etc is way faster than any of the OEM transfer tools.
Stick my wiener into it
Music mostly. I have over a terabyte of FLAC files stored on my home NAS and whilst I do have a Navidrome instance setup to stream it all, it’s not as reliable as just playing locally.
Fair enough. Does a phone have a good enough chip to play FLAC to it’s full strength?
Apps, scheduled backups, photos, offline maps, music.
Would rather not store most things on the device NAND as it has a finite shelf life
What’s the shelf life of the NAND? Thought it was sth like 10 years
In theory, but phones do soooo much with the NAND that I think it varies quite largely.
I’ve struggled to get more than 3-5 years out of my devices, and its seemed to be the NAND causing the failure in my limited experience
My galaxy S4 failed after two years and would go straight into firmware flashing mode when connected to a computer. Leading up to this, it was reallllyyyy slow. I eventually narrowed this down to the internal storage, and moved my apps to the SD card where things sped up again. It would also frequently reboot.
My Galaxy S5 (RIP 🤧) failed after a good 6 year run, now it goes straight to recovery with
MMC_READ failedsadlyOn the opposite end of things I’ve got an old Android 4 tablet from 2013 that still works perfectly fine, although I don’t really have any reason to use it, it’s kinda just existing as a time capsule.
Thanks for sharing your experience :) Glad I never had such issues with my devices, but I guess it heavily depends on the specific device and the usecases.
My current Op 7 Pro has also been running without a problem. But in case it happens I know what might be the cause
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Tbf, FP4 will still have replacement parts available for years to come. Not as good as having a (potentially indefinite) upgrade path, but FP4 isn’t obsolete.
I don’t think this will ever happen, it’s an anomaly unique to the PC market. The first time Fairphone did this with the FP3, allowing users to upgrade their camera, there was some minor OS workaround added to make this work, because the hardware in phones just isn’t set up to handle this.
IIRC I believe the workaround involved trying to get the installed camera to do something that the old one was not capable of doing, and if that operation failed it would spin up the driver for the upgraded camera. PCs use shared memory and a bunch of other standardised stuff I’m unfamiliar with to simply ask a device what it is, but phones can’t do that for their internals (for the most part)
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No headphone jack? Wtf?! Pass!
GSMarena reports displayport support in the USB.
Can anyone confirm this? The site doesn’t mention it and it’s a game changing feature imo.
Smartphones technology progress is slowed down recently, but still, do you think that this phone will be usable in 8 years?
It won’t be top of the line, but I don’t really see why it wouldn’t still be usable at least.
And even if the person buying the phone today won’t consider it usable for their needs in eight years time, they can still sell it to someone who doesn’t have a need for a high spec’ed phone.I think you can look at it similarly to how one would look at an 8 year old laptop today.
A decently spec’ed laptop from 2015 is still very usable today, as long as you keep your expectations reasonable.For example, because most of the apps (including browsers) could have much higher hardware requirements in 10 years.
I have a Galaxy s5 and it would still be usable with a custom ROM if parts of the hardware didn’t die and so are ages old Laptops…
I have a Galaxy S4 and it’s basically unusable at this point. I was able to install LineageOS and the home screen feels okay, but it stutters like hell when I do anything more demanding such as browsing YouTube.
Hmm, Newpipe works fine for me but really heavy websites definitrly are a pain, still clearly usable all in all tho and considering how much slower smartphone development is now I have no doubts a good device will be usable in eight years, you can look at the computer side to tell that hardware requirements for general use probably won’t increase much for the forseeable future!
Usable is subjective. Would it run WhatsApp, viodecalls, banking apps, YouTube etc?
You have a good experience with aged laptops I have a different one. This does not help much. It would be interesting to see a real data, but I do not think it exist/published. ☹️
Idk why video calls and Whatsapp wouldn’t work but I never used the normal Youtube app so all I can tell you is that Newpipe still works great, the official Youtube website is definitely a pain like any JS heavy piece of garbage. Not sure why you would have a bad experience with old Laptops unless they break or you try to run Windows on one, if you got at least 2GB of RAM in it you should be fine in my experience but 4GB is more ideal these days.
That’s a valid concern, but it also assumes that the requirements for apps will go up in a similar trend as they did in the previous 8-10 years.
I’m not entirely convinced that they will. Smartphones 10 years ago were still very much a developing product category, whereas I think today they are generally matured.Just look at laptops as a comparison. When they were still rapidly developing, an eight year old laptop would have pretty much been obsolete. But today an eight year old laptop will still serve most people perfectly fine.
Not that sure, to be honest. I remember how a few (5 I think) years old midrange laptop became hardly usable for internet browsing.
It will be very interesting to get data about real life usage of fair phones (and other phones as well) - like what % of sold phones are still used in 1, 2, 5, 8.
That’s rubbish, 2018 most laptops were using 8th gen Intel CPUs, and they still work fine today for web-browsing and doing word processing and not too heavy spreadsheet work. An i5 from that era is still perfectly usable.
@HidingCat @shaked_coffee @gelberhut @Humanius an 8th gen i7 is still a beast, even if most laptop ones only have 4 cores.
Browsers will never have a higher requirement. It’s the particular websites that will use newer technologies that older browsers may not support.
It may not be a mainline browser, but there’s no reason you couldn’t grab a new browser made to allow your currently out of date phone to use newer features, or at least the features your phone supported at launch. A cursory search on fdroid showed at least 1 browser with a requirement of android 4.4+.
The main thing to remember is that every website doesn’t take more power or newer technologies than the last. It’s only very specific situations where anything will need more power than something had 5 years ago. 99% of my apps could run on anything probably just fine. Email, Music, Audiobooks, VPN, 2FA etc. Most of those probably have security checks requiring a minimum OS version. Meaning they would actually work for longer on a phone with longterm OS updates than a phone that’s much stronger.
With the obvious exception being games. But I would never recommend thinking long term about games in any circumstance.
Sure, games are a separate story (for both, laptops and phones)
How old is your phone and what was the reason you upgraded it last time, if I may ask?
My phone is 2 years old for me. I bought a oneplus 8 refurb in 2020 for Christmas. Unlocked and outright. I got it because my Galaxy S9 before that was Verizon locked, and I just got off my parent’s phone plan. Verizon is very expensive.
I’ll still use my old phone from time to time. Mainly for dual account Pokemon Go, or plug it up to a TV to watch something that doesn’t support cast, like Newpipe.
I’ll keep this phone as long as I can. It’s on its last update, though. I’ll use LineageOS when I can.
If you are used to it, probably. I know that my pixel 4a is slowing down after 3 years. But I am just used to the speed, so it is okay for me.
I don’t really feel that my 4a slowed down, but the battery is degraded for sure. Battery life was never amazing, but now it’s just bad. So this is why I am looking at the Fairphone: If I could just swap my battery easily, I would just continue using my 4a.
The battery on my 4a is down to 66% capacity.
It does feel slower with newer apps, as those need more power.
Yes. This is more or less my view as well. it could be technically usable in 8 years, but very few people would accept this experience.
And I do not think that a noticeable percentage of fearphones 5 will be in use in 7 years.
Isn’t GrapheneOS supported on Fairphone as well?
No, only pixel.
No graphene OS support, they rely on some secure isolation hardware feature only found on Google Tensor chips, unique to Pixel phones
Fairphone officially has e/OS (Murena??) , but there are a few unofficial alternatives too
Ah alright. Thanks for the clarification
Kudos on Fairphone for offering 8 years of software updates.
As an owner of FP4, my biggest gripes with the FP4 are the software updates. Bugs keep languishing for months before they are acknowledged and then months pass before the bugs are fixed. Three annoying issues with my FP4 that I deal with on a daily basis:
- Screen dimming bug. First reported in Feb and the earliest possible fix is in October. My phone is useless when I’m out and about and the level of urgency implied by FP4 for this issue baffles me.
- NFC stops working randomly
- 5 GHz hotspot was broken for months and only fixed recently
I don’t care much about Android 13 as long as I get timely security patches. What I want is a bug free experience and that’s something FP4 fails to deliver.
An annoying hardware decision is the SIM card can’t be hot swapped. Not sure why this wasn’t addressed with FP5.
@shaked_coffee I wanted to buy the Fairphone in December, when I had to (somewhat) urgently change my phone. The fact that it’s priced really high for just being repairable makes little sense. In the end, even though I did not want to stay on Nokia, I purchased a Nokia G22 and I couldn’t be happier.
It’s better to buy three used phones that are more powerful and cheaper and keep those out of the landfill than a fairphone.
I know this philosophy has to start somewhere but it’s just bad from a value, performance and supported accessories view.
Bingo, we should try to buy used rather than new to impact ewaste rates.
Just buy a used Fairphone 5 then in a few years? That’s what I’m gonna do I think. This one is powerful enough imo
One of the reasons why I would buy a repairable phone is it’s reliability in the long run. For instance, my previous phone, a Nokia, had a broken USB-C port. Replacing it would be pretty hard to do myself, or expensive to let somebody else do it. And that is if you can find replacement parts at all. One of the main benefits of a phone like the Fairphone, is that I can just order a new port from the manufacturer for a low price, without any unexpected costs, and replace it in 15 minutes. I still have some photo’s on that phone because they were not automatically backed up. The Nokia also was pretty unusable even when it worked, because the software was borderline criminally bad. However, the bootloader was locked so I couldn’t change it.
buying a second ahnd flagship is also a great way to save a bit on the environment, but it’s won’t be as reliable, the condition of the battery will probably be worse and you’ll have to watch out that you don’t buy a phone that doesn’t get any updates anymore (or at least has a unlocked bootloader if you’re willing to flash a custom ROM)
