This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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 ๐ ๐คช ๐ ๐ ๐
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.
Not only is HMD Global not Chinese, they're actually the same Finnish company that people think of as "Nokia". Nokia do a lot more than just phones and they sold their mobile phone arm to Microsoft, who then spun it off as it's own company called HMD who licensed the Nokia name.
If you want to buy from a European brand, HMD/Nokia are worth considering.
Well, shit..you're right. I messed up. I was pretty sure HMD is Chinese. Sorry for the drama, I felt very frustrated with Nokia since the downfall of Lumia. I'll consider it, but looking forward to get the shiftphone 8 when released atm.
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...
They are making an effort though. Every other manufacturer also produces in China. Fairphone at least pays the workers better and tries to make the supply chain as ethical as possible.
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 riskยฎโข (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?
Yes a lot of parts. The Kernel is made for that specific SOC and may not get updated.
Then you have various parts like the modem are made by Samsung, Broadcomm etc. and need their firmware updates.
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.
USB-C earbuds exist. No one is "forcing" you to do anything.
Having tried to use USB-C earbuds... the experience is lacking. Once they are plugged in there is a 2-5s lag for when the headphones start working. 30% of the time they don't work, having to unplug and plug them in to try again. Some apps won't use them at all if the headphones are not plugged in before you start a call (google voice).
Even if you got them working, they stick out of the bottom of the phone, so propping up the phone on a desk for a video call is now super awkward.
It's a poor echo of the experience of physically wired RTTP headphones.
Never had those problems. Worked for me better than the AUX port actually, since no metal spring got damaged over time like in most of my previous phones.
The dongle works just like AUX earphones worked
I like my Pixel 7 Pro but its also my first phone without a headphone jack and I hate it. Bluetooth is such a shitty standard and the USB dongles suck ass too. Why the fuck did they have to get rid of something so simple and practical...
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.
But tgats stupid, since no manufacturer has parts available for that long. And fairphone released an update for the FP2 after 8 years of being available. Thats crazy! I think it got out around the same time as the Samsung S3. Try finding a genuine battery for that thing.
And also the FP1 and FP2 were sold in really low quantities. The FP3 was the first proper product, which therefor has much better support and will have parts available for much longer
That's a fair perspective, but that is also not what I consider "sustainable" as they themselves claim to be. I fail to see how that is stupid, stupid is calling ones company sustainable, when it's not ten years down the line.
Trust already broken.
Well, android itself is only 15 years old. To put that into perspective.
But yes, I would also be hella mad if they stopped supporting the FP4 or FP5 after "only" 8 or 10 years.
No headphone jack means fairphone now encourage Bluetooth earbuds and electronic waste.
They're dead to me.
Dont get me wrong, Im pissed about the removal of the headphone jack too. But its not really their fault, or to be more precise: its complicated This guys explains it quite well
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M&pp=ygUYZmFpcnBob25lIGhlYWRwaG9uZSBqYWNr
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
But iPhones get long support, pixels now get 7, and S24 get 7.
Fairphone themselves even admits they can't fix everything in production so a phone that was about to be waste is more fair.
If they built their phones in Germany or something I could accept the price but they're made in China where labor standards aren't exactly great.
Yes they are obviously not perfect but they are at least trying to change something, while the massive cooperations just dont acknowledge that problem at all.
And the updates thing: Apple controls the ecosystem and are a huge company. They dont have to worry about manufactures for a processor or other parts not supporting it longer and stop giving it driver updates. Same with Samsung and especially Google. They are huge companies that can basically do what they want. They will be able to get a hold of drivers and firmware because they are a huge customer to the manufactures. And they only just started promising those long updates. Meanwhile Fairphone has been trying for years to support their devices that long and had to struggle because they are not a massive cooperation that can influence manufactures like that to the point they now dont use normal consumer grade chips but ones with extended support.
Do they pay you to "yeah but" for them or are you just a simp?
