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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Subreddit? You high man? Do you need some water? Have you eaten well?
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)
Another FP3 user here.
I wish the device had more RAM though.
I use lineageos with zram on mine. It works wonders
Interesting, Fedora Linux uses zram too, is this a general thing on Android?
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.
The new one is definitely too expensive for me. I have a phone that I’m not really happy with, but I’m keeping it for as long as possible. After that, I’m probably going to look for a used fairphone. I don’t see myself going with another completely unrepairable device.
In theory,yes.
I won’t buy it as my whole charging environment is wireless these days and the FP5 has no wireless charging.
Rolling back of course would be possible but annoying, especially for phone I would use for 5 years possibly.
It won’t be as good as native hardware support, but you can buy a device to add wireless charging. It plugs into the phone USB-C and has a short flexible cable leading into a thin (1 mm maybe) wireless charger receiver that can fit inside a phone case
Yeah, had one of these for previous phones,but most don’t fit properly with cases and if you need to properly charge the phone you are always fiddling around. Was not really satisfied with them.
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.
No.
No headphone jack, no buy. It’s not a question of whether a headphone jack is useful to you, it’s just the principle of it - there’s no good reason to remove it (especially for the asking price of FP5), and more importantly, it goes against what the Fairphone stands for, IMO. I can understand if it were some other profit-driven company making a shrewd business decision, but for Fairphone to do it, seems very unfair to me.
Regarding the “no good reason to remove it,” my understanding was that Samsung opted to remove it to increase the water resistance rating. Unfortunately the fairphone 4 only has an IP54 rating, so that’s certainly not the case here.
Apparently they address the headphones jack question in an article on fairphone’s support page.
On the GrapheneOS side, a used Pixel 5a js the last good phone… both size and a headphone jack. Sucks a lot.
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?
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.
I bought the FP3, then upgraded it to an FP3+ when the camera broke. Never had as much fun with a phone before or since. It has been my daily driver for years and it did everything well enough, if a bit slow. My friends either get new phones or use them despite visible damage because they can’t fix them. Now I ordered the FP5 to have the 3+ as a backup and test setup and I am confident I will use the FP5 for 3-6 years again :)
Fairphones are like an odd car: There are sleeker, faster, cheaper and maybe just better alternatives around. However you still like it and just learn where to hit it with a hammer when it starts making funny noises. If you can afford it and like odd devices, it’s for you.
Don’t hit your phone with a hammer please . 🤓
You can’t tell me what to do!!!
…but it kinda makes sense, so I won’t hit it with a hammer 😐
