The new fairphone 5 came out, it looks cool but the price is really, really high…
If it’s a phone that can really last 10 years it could be good, but is that true? Is it worth it? I could get the one with /e/os from Murena because i want a degoogled phone with a bootloader locked, but is it usable on a daily basis?
If you’re not a power user, then it’ll probably work fine for several years. And it will be cheap and easy to replace the battery in 3-5 years when it starts to degrade, or replace the screen if you drop it. Not sure if a full 10 year lifespan is realistic, though.
And you’re right, the price is high, but it’s not supposed to be an affordable phone. The stated goal of the Fairphone is to be better for the environment and better for people than most other electronics. So, they have to do things like use sustainable materials and source parts from places that treat their workers well. All of that means that Fairphones will NEVER be as cheap as other brands. Because doing things right costs more.
We’ll probably never be allowed Fairphone in USA, which I’ve been eying since before launch. Curiosity got the better of me anyway; it’s still cheaper than iPhone https://eu.mobgsm.com/mobile/apple-iphone-14-pro-max-price-in-europe
Do you not count the Murena partnership? I’ve been considering a Fairphone since I saw this.
I don’t know enough about Murena to speculate, let alone comment
Wasn’t the FP4 launched in the US recently?
I had to search, and so it was! https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair
It’s still currently not budgetable, but it’s closer! Thanks for great news!
Why did you think it wouldn’t be allowed in USA?
Honestly? Because politicians and citizens alike would use it as a rallying cry, label it “European soshulist garbage.” Ffs, they even aoc and Bernie claim they’re socialists. They aren’t.
Since we are in a privacy subreddit, I will say that Fairphone is second only to the Google Pixel in terms of support for privacy focused versions of Android. For privacy specifically, they are a great choice.
But the price is just too much, jesus. I can’t spend 600 euros on a phone
Just buy a secondhand Pixel.
Yes i was already considering that. Particularly i was looking to buy one on this website , seems like the cheapest option i’ve found so far
Kids are very cheap labour. If you want them to build a phone for you, just buy any other brand.
Bruh so sorry if for me a purchase of 600 euros is just too much, i don’t work and i don’t expect to receive money from anybody right now, so i guess if you are the one who wants to give me the opportunity of not putting kids to build my next phone then now’s your big chance
Just ignore the downvotes, people are garbage and that doubles online!
Yes indeed, reddit taught me this already
Why are you complaining about the price of a smartphone when you don’t even have an income?
deleted by creator
Oh what, i can’t? If i had an income i could magically have the right to rant about it? Even without income, every now and then i manage to make substantial purchases, but we’re talking about 600€ then it’s just too much for me to handle
You can complain about whatever you want, I just don’t understand the logic behind this particular complaint. According to you, not only do you not have an income but you don’t work at all. The problem here is quite clearly your situation in life and not the price of the phone. Complaining about the price of luxury items is just completely asinine when you have no reliable source of income and are doing nothing to change that.
Ahem, did you mean community?
Soyuz…
Sorry…force of habit…
Subreddit? You high man? Do you need some water? Have you eaten well?
If there is a phone on the market that could guarantee ethical labor but costs less than the fairphone, I’d buy that instead.
I’m very concerned about the low waterproofing and the lack of variety in phone cases.
De-googling my phone sounds nice but actually having a constant trace of my location provides a layer of safety and security, doesn’t it?
Do not buy preloaded LineageOS or /e/ OS phones or any Android phones without proper Verified Boot support and firmware updates. These devices also have no way for you to check whether they’ve been tampered with.> from privacyguides.org
Any of these “verified boot” phones ever get tested against million dollar Cellebrite kits, or is it just custom ROM hobbyist developer assurance that there is full bootloader protection against Evil Maid and such attacks?
Last time I saw GrapheneOS lying about it:
That isn’t an official GrapheneOS channel, it’s called PrivacyPhones. I doubt it’s a person involved with GrapheneOS trying to spread FUD or something. You could always go make questions on the official chatrooms.
The same forum where Micay’s lies about swatting, years of claims of harassment and numerous other deeds are censored, not allowed to be questioned for evidence, and handed over bans for? Every such person affiliated with or bearing their logo has always, without exception, has ended up being either a member or benefiting party, throughout the years. Last year they even sent one spy in my r/privatelife Matrix chatroom (ryan97) to stalk me for months, until I kicked him out over his malicious attitude, only to find later that he was their plant siphoning all of my private chatroom’s chat logs.
The price, no headphones plug…
Doesn’t seem fair to me to be honest.
I was made aware that at most its 5 years of security updates due to the QCM6490 and then software for the remainder. 5 years is still pretty good but at that price point I would wait to see what google has to offer and then use grapheneos if its an option.
Also, 5 years counting from where
Fairphone is still keeping the FP3 alive and the hardware support for that phone has long since ended. They promise to work around the lacking support for the drivers of the FP5 and I believe that they will.
They will issue updates. But they can’t work around base firmware security issues. That’s the problem. The SOC drivers are connected to everything, they have total control of the phone, if there’s a security issue there it’s game over. No amount of operating system patching is going to help you
Does it have a headphone jack and SD card reader? No? Not worth it.
It does have an SD card slot at least:
STORAGE
8GB 256GB internal storage External storage capacity: microSD up to 2TB (SD 3.0)it has a SD-Card Slot. and i personally don’t care much for a Headphone Jack ever since USB-C-Headphones became a thing
what modern phone does?
Xperia 5 V
Cheapest Sony phone is $999 USD. Spending all that money for a headphone jack? No thanks lol
You could just get a $500 midrange (or even cheaper phones if you want) and get a cheap $30 wireless esrbuds
You get more than a headphone jack for more money, the X5V is a much better all round device than any $500 phone.
But ignoring that oversight for a moment. Just because you can settle for some cheap $30 earbuds doesnt mean people who want good audio should have to, why defend the removal of such a useful port. It was only done initially to try to sell their overpriced wireless options.
Every phone, especially flagships should have a 3.5mm port and without question an SD card slot.
Sony phones have like 3 years support maximum and no one develops custom operating systems for them. They are dogshit value.
Im not arguing for that specific phone, but for the inclusion of good features that were only removed in the name of profit.
deleted by creator
what do u have rn?
It actually does have a microSD card reader according to the specs sheet. Sadly no headphone jack, which would make this really appealing.
It actually does have a micro sd slot. But no headphone jack, most phones these days don’t. So your alternative to a repairable phone with no headphone jack is a non-repairable phone that also does not have a headphone jack.
I use the FP3. It’s an old device but I find it very responsive, and keeps up with what I need it to do personally. I like it, but don’t like Android. I wish the device had more RAM though.
The FP5 looks promising (and big 😳) the only turn offs for me are no 3.5mm headphone jack, and the price could do with another 150-200 off at least. Since FP is a niche company with some special supply chain arrangements, I think this price is the best we’ll get for now (unless you trade in an old device for recycling for money off), but it’s still expensive.
If you value the ability to own and repair your device, the knowledge that people further down in the supply chain get paid a little extra when they’re collecting materials for Fairphone, and that your device will very, very likely get supported for the full time they claim (and even longer in the case of the FP2), then it’s probably worth it.
Otherwise, a new/recent Pixel (eligible to recieve GrapheneOS updates) is another very good option.
Regardless of what device you choose, if you want to keep your next phone for 10 years, you’ll want a lot of onboard storage - but keep as much things as possible on an SD card. This is to avoid burning out your onboard NAND, since it has a finite lifespan and not replaceable.
Pixels don’t support SD cards AFAIK, so if you go for one of them I’d recommend going for the highest builtin storage that you can afford (especially if it’s a used one)
I’m not terribly familiar with the Fairphones, but are you able to upgrade the ram yourself? I feel like that should be a key part of the modularity concept.
Modern system on chip type processors and their RAM and even ROM are pretty rightly coupled. Modem also. Upgrade would essentially be a full board swap.
Which would be a neat feature, but probably hard to make happen.
no 3.5mm headphone jack
Whaaaat? Why?
Another FP3 user here.
I wish the device had more RAM though.
I use lineageos with zram on mine. It works wonders
What is zram? It it a baked in feature of Lineage or is it an add on? I’ve got MicroG LOS on my FP3 and it runs well enough.
Zram basically compresses the ram. Afaik it’s enabled by default in LOS.
Interesting, Fedora Linux uses zram too, is this a general thing on Android?
A second-hand phone is always worthier
No it sucks don’t get it.
If you’re serious about privacy and can tolerate apple stuff, get an iphone. If you’re serious about privacy and would prefer android you’re pretty much stuck with one of the pixel phones and graphene.
I went with an iphone last time I made this choice. The degree of difference wasn’t enough for me and I keep an android device for stuff that requires it anyway. Your mileage may vary but my recommendation is to get the device with the widest install base if you want it to last. Something’s gonna break but getting parts will be easier for idk a nexus 5 or iphone se than a blue branded tablet.
It’s too expensive for me. Not worth it when a used Pixel is way cheaper, has way better hardware and has support for GrapheneOS.
It might be expensive when you compare it to the lifetime of a regular phone, but compare it to what you’d spend instead on regular phones within the potential lifetime of 7-8 years of the FP5 (minus 1-2 minor repairs).
Also no one is talking about that fact that it’s fair as in equitable. Like everyone who worked to make it got paid, which is not something you can say about any of the big phone makes AFAIK.
This does not only depend on the hardware’s lifespan but the software itself too. If there is no longtime support the average user might be better of using a more recent phone where all apps will work and there are not that much security issues.
Official software support for the FF5 is 8 years, I believe
Fairphone offers 8 years of software updates and aims to reach even 10.
Well they can promise updates yes. But they are limited on the android version to the manufacturer of the chips. The company shift which has a similar concept as Fairphone currently suffers from that problem: they cannot upgrade their shift5me to a higher version than android 8 and a lot of apps recently dropped their support to older android versions (e.g. banking apps)
Fairphone have been dealing with this problem of unsupported chips for quite some years now (the hardest lesson learned was probably selecting Mediatek for the FP1) and they’ve become better and better at it - up to the point, that they chose not a mobile, but an IoT SoC for the FP5 for which they got Qualcomm to commit to much longer support than ever before. I don’t see why reason, why they shouldn’t manage to stick to this commitment in this case. On top of that, they’re even working with Qualcomm to allow for replacable SoCs for future upgrades without having to replace the whole mainboard incl. storage etc.
They worked closely with Qualcomm on selecting a chip for this exact reason.
Got me a refurb pixel 5a last year for $100. It’s been great and way better then my moto g power I had previously.
I second this. Got an open box pixel 6 pro this year for $400, still blows most non-flagship current year phones out of the water.
Nice, I got a renewed one from Amazon this year for $330. It was as good as new, no scratches whatsoever, battery health was at 99% and still had 3 months of warranty left.
Ten years is an extremely long time in tech and we might not even be using phones as we currently know them by then.
It might not be. Consider that moore’s law is coming to an end. I fully expect more and more products to be cloud based and ai based. I don’t think ai can run on our phone even in the near future. Battery is another issue, you can’t afford to run too much stuff on it.
We as consumers now need to adjust to the ending moore’s law.
God I hope so. I’m sick of consumer tech constantly being in a marketing cycle
To me it doesn’t look like that long a time for another revolutionary piece of tech to make its way, but what do you think would be the next big thing?
Hmm, I’m very doubtful that could be reasonably priced so soon, but we’ll see I guess
10 years ago the Samsung Galaxz S4 released, let’s compare its specs with the current phone
Samsung Galaxzy S4 <> Galaxy S23
Display size: 5" <> 6.1"
Resolutuion: Full HD <> 120hz 2k AMOLED
CPU: 4x1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & 4x1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 <> 1x3.36 GHz Cortex-X3 & 2x2.8 GHz Cortex-A715 & 2x2.8 GHz Cortex-A710 & 3x2.0 GHz Cortex-A510
RAM: 2GB <> 8GB
Storage: 16-64GB <;> 128-512GB
The question is, do you want to run 10 year old hardware even if its software is supported?
The newer hardware tends to usually have a longer lifespan. A 10-year old computer today is a 3rd or 4th gen Core i7, still decently powerful. A 10-year old computer 10 years ago was a Pentium 4, pretty much useless.
Same will apply to phones. I had an S5 that I bought in 2014 which by 2019 actually was getting too old, hobbled by it’s paltry 2GB of RAM. Bought an S8 in 2019 which already was 2 years old and it’s already outlived the S5 by almost 2 years. It’s starting to show signs of age but will probably last at least another couple years. I’m expecting the S22/S23 Ultra to last into the 2030s.
I don’t need more for calls and text messages, right? Even browser works.
So
- 22% more screen
- twice the pixels
- the same number of cores, though undoubtedly faster
- four times the ram
- 2 to 32 times the storage
Not that impressive for ten years of development to be honest. In addition to that there are limits to what is required for everyday usage. Not to make a “640k should be enough for everybody”, but browser and messaging only requires a few GB of RAM and will do so for the foreseeable future. 8GB is future proof enough for the vast majority of use cases.
I have 2TB of storage in my PC. The actually important part (documents and programs) take up minuscule amounts of space. The remainder is for AI models, movies and games, all of which I could delete and download again.
That’s not the question. There is no singular reason to buy the Fairphone 5 and a purchase is not necessarily a commitment to a full 8 - 10 years of use. Focusing solely on one aspect of the device, like its modular components or the long-term software support, is missing the bigger picture.
But it is the question.
OP wants to know if fairphone will last 10 years. The retort is that even if you can have a phone that is supported for 10 years, you won’t want to use it that long.
Even if they use it for 5 years and then move to something else, it still offers benefits that very few modern phones have. And it’s still the most ethical by an absolute mile. You don’t need to use a Fairphone for the entire support period for it to become a worthwhile purchase.
Most of that progression was made in the first 5 years, the last 5 years for new phone tech have been a lot slower. I don’t know if any spec in the next 5 will really make me want to upgrade, stuff just works atm
I feel like we reached the stage where any improvements are really just incremental and small, you used to get a massively different experience when upgrading your phone even just a year later in the early days, nowadays you can barely tell the difference between new and 5 year old models.
When we get in that state of a technology, we should definitely be looking at how to make our devices last longer instead of renewing yearly / bi-yearly.
When we get in that state of a technology, we should definitely be looking at how to make our devices last longer instead of renewing yearly / bi-yearly.
Won’t somebody please think of the
childrenprofits?
I am thinking it is. I cannot find one decent phone with a great ultrawide camera AND a SD card slot, both in one phone. And I mean flagship grade, when I mean great. I maintain manually on paper a list of good ultrawide phones, and the list across the whole price range barely has 20ish phones, most of which happen to be $1500 flagships.
I can forego the 3.5 jack (unfortunate) and compromise with a dongle, but the expandable storage and ultrawide are impossible to compromise. There is only Honor 90 and Nothing Phone 2, that fit the ultrawide criteria with a decent price, but they do not give SD card slot either.
People shitting on it are finding arbitrary reasons, I think. The 3.5 jack exclusion may be “ethically” not in line, but sure as hell tell me one phone that fits the above criteria.
And before someone pops in to tell me Pixel has good camera, no, the camera hardware is simply superior on FP5, and loading GCam on it will be a non-issue. FP5 with GCam is probably the best midrange ultrawide on the market alongside Honor 90.
Edit: most of the ultrawide phones on the market today have the exact same 8 megapixel 1/4.0" UW sensor as that on my Huawei P30 Lite from 4 years ago. And let me tell you, if I do not click in RAW, that ultrawide is a potato. I need upgrade, not a forsake sidegrade. Ultrawide camera is the biggest differentiator among smartphones across the whole price range.
Depends on what you’re using the phone for. Personally, my usage isn’t very demanding, so having a phone that’s going to have security updates and a replaceable battery will probably let me use the phone for 5+ years.
I probably won’t keep the phone for 10 years, but it means I can upgrade on my schedule, not just because some company decided for me.
I can hear consumers now, “ But I want muh planned obsolescence!”
