Fairphone 4 is coming to the US • Hacker News Board

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#131

Post by berkes » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 8:01 AM UTC

dadoomer wrote: post #85

frazar0 wrote: post #13

Fairphone 4 has been my main and only phone for several months now. Great experience, very good battary life. Performance-wise, I haven't noticed any significant difference compared to traditional phones. The only drawbacks might be the camera and thickness, but honestly I don't care much. Of course, much depends on your use case and expectations. YMMV.

Is it possible to swap batteries on the go? That'd be killer. I only replaced my phone this year (S7 edge) because the battery was depleting too fast.

Yes. A spare battery is cheap too.

You cannot swap it "live" though, phone needs to be shut off and then booted.

Also, there's no external loading hardware. So some logistics needed to get the spare batteries full.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#132

Post by berkes » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 8:07 AM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #55

phh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer who spend the vast majority of his time on (successfully) putting newer Android versions on the vast majority of older Android devices: Yes the hardware is the bottleneck. This pains me, because what I can do is software, not hardware, where I spend all of my time is software. An app just needs to target Android 7 to target 95%+ of users (so "only" 5% additional e-waste). And for app developers…

More reasons: Phone is lost Phone breaks beyond a reasonable cost of repair Phone fills up with WhatsApp pictures and after months or years of deleting them they buy a new phone with double storage, which is already not enough. Children grow, get the old phone of one of their parents and the parent buys a new one.

The full disk part is solvable, and solved, by offering SD card slots.

Fairphone has this (and so do some other phones). It works.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#133

Post by phh » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 8:24 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #54

TheMode wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand your concerns, but still I believe that you aren't asking yourself the right question. Why do you need to port newer Android versions on older devices at all? It seems like the real problem to me. Why do running newer software must depend on a newer operating system? Do you believe that everything that is part of the android codebase is necessary to run a chat app? Part of the problem is that we se…

Google will no longer let you upload an app to the store that is compatible with old android. Doing so is a privacy loophole, since newer OS's have stronger privacy protections.

As far as I know, that's wrong? You must "target" newer OS versions (to prevent loopholes as you mention), but you can still have whichever "min" OS version you want.