Technology

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.

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 😂 🤪 😆 😜 😋

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.

Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all

• extremely slow updates
• incomplete updates as component lifespan is shorter than advertized

Yeah, its about what comes in the Future

Less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years sounds like most video games now.

I'm on my 5th year with my Oneplus 6.

I suspect I'd I do a full wipe, a new OS and a fresh battery I should be able to keep it going for a couple more.

Phones plateaued for me. It runs fast. It holds more then enough data.

Camera is a little slow. I've been told to stop using the default camera app. But then the double click to open won't work.

Wow a site that doesn't fill up 90% of your phone's viewport with ads? Color me impressed

So "Occasionally sluggish performance" now at launch? Surely it won't be much better 5 years from now

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.

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.

for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone

laughs in Fairphone 3

Its mediocre camera is a deal breaker for me. Camera is the most important phone feature to me

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/93195

They 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 firmware support for its SoC.
https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Press_release_Fairphone_5.pdf

This is the best summary I could come up with:

There are those who are happy to be in the market for a new device, who delight in discovering how phones have improved since they last upgraded and who can’t wait to reap the benefits of better low-light camera performance, a prettier display, and more premium build quality.

They’re the people who respond with despair when they’re told that their phone has reached the end of its software support period or that it’s no longer cost-effective to repair a seemingly minor hardware fault.

But now the phone comes equipped with technological advancements such as a modern OLED display with a high refresh rate, more robust waterproofing, and a higher-capacity battery.

To that end, there are actually more individually accessible modules this time around, which is nice if you, say, only need to replace one rear camera that’s broken or swap out a faulty SIM card tray.

That’s better than the IP54 rating of the Fairphone 4 (which was still resilient enough for me to use throughout an exceptionally rainy hike), but it still falls short of allowing you to fully immerse the device in water like you can do with an IP68-rated phone.

In low light, the phone produces superficially nice shots, but peer a little closer, and it looks like this is the work of aggressive processing, with a lot of fine detail smoothed out and colors artificially boosted.

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