Wish it was available here in India. i would have totally bought this for my father. Repairing these phones is better than buying new ones when he barely does anything other than WhatsApp, youtube and calls.
I didn't mean in the sense that it's been more practical. I was replying more to the idea that repairing being better isn't dependent on a phone getting very light usage which is what they seemed to be impying.
Very few new phone features released in the last 5 years or so add very much real value for very many people.
Threads for Fairphone often fill up with “it’s not going to work if they don’t X.” Lots of people don’t seem to understand that their personal viewpoint can be quite different from other’s.
There are people who are aware of the trade-offs of a Fairphone, but still choose to get one.
I’ve always been in favour of a phone with a shitty camera. I don’t give a fuck about posting on social media, and these days a huge chunk of a phone’s price is determined by how powerful of a camera they were able to cram into it.
I recognize that this apparently sounds insane to most people.
In terms of BOM the cameras usually aren't even that much. It's just one factor that allows them to differentiate "premium" phones they can gouge more for.
It’s nice to have a decent camera, but honestly, 90% of the people (including myself) are so bad at taking pictures, that the difference between mid range and ultra premium is almost zero.
The only thing that’s really really cool is night mode. My Pixel can take really great photos with extremely low light levels.
Actually in the past they updated their software even past the support from qualcomm, rewriting by themselves what was needed to allow and old chipset to run newer android version
Yeah, well, they are just doing what custom ROM makers have been doing for a decade and a half.
My old Droid 4 was also EOL after Android 4.1. Custom ROM makers pushed this up to Android 7.1 by ignoring the parts (e.g. the Kernel) that they couldn’t update.
Sure, but the good is that this is the only company doing it. Also my Galaxy Nexus received a big kernel update from people at xda developers, but was by chance and good will of the people involved. Here they did it because they kept up the commercial promise behind the product they sell, something that basically no other company in this sector does (or they do, but with very short term promises).
The price is also higher because they use fair trade gold and whatnot. Given the mission to clean up the electronics industry it's plesently suprising it doesn't cost more
Sorry, I misunderstood what OP was trying to say. I didn’t realise they were talking about feature updates when they mentioned the 5 years. A security patch is still an update to the operating system and evidence of support, so my initial reaction was that they were wrong when they said “5 years of OS support”.
There’s a clear trajectory where this is heading. From 2027 the EU will enforce replaceable batteries and it looks like some other markets might follow. Software support duration is increasing a lot as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d get most of the Fairphone’s benefits on a regular Samsung in a few years.
No really. Samsung offers 4 years of os updates and 5 years of security updates. Samsung releases os updates really fast, so 5 years basically means 5 os versions.
Fairhone declares 5 os versions and 8 years of software support. Fairphone users here mentioned that fairphone is very slow with updates, so it could happen that 5 os versions really will take 8 years. If Fairphone will keep same cadence as Samsung, its 5 os versions can be coverted into 5 years.
But we have a bit of apples vs oranges here.
I personally find samsung’s policy good enough for majority of users. I expect that I will upgrade my phone every 3 - 5 years for different unpredictable today reasons anyway.
How fast do you need your phone to be for sending messages, streaming video, or browsing the web? Every phone made in the last decade can do these things.
The high price actually cancels the point of the repairability. I can get a similar phone for easily €400-500 less. If I budget that extra price for repairs, I can get the battery and screen replaced quite a few times.
I say that as an FP4 owner, who did the same calculation mistake there.
That may be true but how are they guaranteeing this on a component level? As far as I know, they use off the shelf stuff so they only have assembly wages. And that doesn’t justify the price imo.
They keep close track of materials used and wage paid for all their suppliers. They also pay wage bonuses to the workers at some of their suppliers (page 41).
Looks pretty nice tbh! Probably going to stick to my current phone a few more years until it stops being updated but if I manage to break it this might just be the replacement.
It will be deGoogled soon enough. The Fairphone 4 is supported across several deGoogled versions of Android including CalyxOS, iodéOS, LineageOS, DivestOS and /e/OS. The Fairphone 3 and even the 2 are also supported by some of those operating systems.
CalyxOS is the most advanced of those I mentioned. They have a monthly update schedule and a larger team. My favourite is iodéOS, though, because of the iodé ad and tracker blocker app which can be used simultaneously with a VPN.
No, I mean it runs system wide and can block ads and trackers from any application. There are definitely no ads in the OS lol
Normally these ad and tracker blocking apps are detected as a VPN by Android, which means you cannot use a real VPN at the same time. iode’s blocker is unique in this area.
Lineage is the oldest one (Divest and /e/ are forks of it). Calyx has a focus on security and privacy (comes with a free VPN with no signup requires). Currzntly Calyx is based on Android 13, even on the Fairphone 4 which doesn’t have it supportes. I son’t know enough about iodé to comment about it though.
I was exited for this phone, but as I said in another thread: I am a bit disappoited about the CPU and the substantial price hike, but most of all aqout the size increase. Is there any market research at all indicating that customers want 6"+ displays?
I live in France, I wanted a phone with buttons that wasn’t just an ODM with a different logo on it. It is an interesting company. I’ve had some contact with them. They are legit going to pull out of China and move production back to France. They uphold their 5 year warranty promise as well.
And, they update their stuff. I’m on Android 13 and apparently older devices are still receiving updates too.
It would be pretty low-key. I wouldn’t want to pry this phone open and then glue it back together. Fairphones are supposed to be rather easy to repair.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people just have zero understanding of how the smartphone industry works. They think small manufacturers like Fairphone just have free reign to get whatever parts they want, offer updates for however long they want, etc.
The reality is that Fairphone have to find a way to work within the system that has been created by big tech. That means selecting parts based on their suitability for the long-term support goals they have. It’s one of the reasons why the specs are mid-range, because these parts stay in circulation for longer. For example, the 4 had a very generic 60 Hz IPS notch display because it was a widely used panel within the industry at the time. Now that higher refresh rate OLEDs have become more common on mid-range devices, Fairphone has been able to put one into the 5.
Is there any market research at all indicating that customers want 6"+ displays?
Unfortunately, yes. People who buy smaller phones are the people who buy a new phone less often, and small phones tend to sell worse than the big models (see S10e, iPhone 12(?) Mini) so don’t get renewed. Would be nice if they did.
It’s so frustrating that this is true. I use devices until they’re dead or at risk of serious compromise before getting another, but the only options are ones that I can’t even hold comfortably with one hand. I’m seriously considering the Jelly 2 at this point.
This is so true. I had a 12 mini and upgraded to the 13 mini in December. The battery is better, and I plan on keeping this until the next mini phone arrives. (If any)
For the FP4 they said one of the reasons they remove the aux input was that more people asked them to reduce the size of their phone than to keep the input.
With you on almost all points. Only the size didn’t actually increase. The phone’s dimensions are exactly the same. Only the weight went up a bit. The screen size was increased by using up more of the phone’s front side.
Also it’s 3x cheaper than my pentium that i bought in 1997 and it has 3000x less ram than this. I know that we don’t have that kind of exponential growth of hardware like we had 10 years ago, but still there is progress and it’s expected to have a better product for the same price each generation.
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