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Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

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Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#371

I never broke a phone, not even scratched the screen but I feel force to buy a new one every 3 years because they become obsolete (I guess apps require more and more memory to the point I cannot have two open at the same time, which kills my ability to pay online). I bought a Framework laptop for the same reason and I successfully managed to upgrade it, not repair it! Is there a phone that allows me to upgrade over t…

I am only buying second hand galaxy s7 (2106) and they work fine. If needed battery replacement is rather easy to do if you follow a tutorial.

I use it watch youtube videos, browse the web (probably not the fastest but fast enough), use Google Maps, take pictures, listen to music. Basic phone usage you know.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#373
post #245
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main board failures are hard, they'll kill just about any phone and it's pretty challenging to make the service part economically viable. For what it's worth, I don't know of any systemic problems / higher than usual error rates with the Fairphone 3 main board. You got unlucky. Consider giving them another shot sometime!

What’s the point of a repairable phone if parts are out of stock?

It's just the kind of part that doesn't merit repairs... it's unfortunate, but with any equipment there will be such parts.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think many people would want to carry two devices instead of one

Imagine it's one device but when you pull it out of your pocket, you pull it in half and only slide out a touchscreen leaving the battery and other guts in your pocket. With some magnetic clips, it could be seamless to slide it back into your pocket to become the larger single brick again which it stays as you take it all out at night to plug in and charge.

Phones are thin and light enough already, I don’t think that’s really necessary

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they are slow. When I pay online, I need to confirm the payment through my bank app. When I switch to it, the browser or shop app closes and I cannot complete the transaction.

That seems kind of odd, my iPhone 12 Pro has zero issues with things like that and it’s three years old. I did upgrade a few weeks ago because the iPhone 15 cameras are amazing and I care a lot about that but I honestly had zero performance reasons to upgrade. I’ve never had an issue with a 5-6 year old phone and I always keep my old phone as a backup specifically for banking.

Trust me, I only use browser, travel apps, Slack, bank apps and nothing else and I've been having issues for a year, I'd say. Maybe that OS is crap and I the phone too, I don't know.

Somehow, I thought 4+2 GiB of ram would suffice.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. Sure, but compared to everything else we use, smartphones use almost no energy. The one I'm typing this on has a battery capacity of 12 wh; if you have a resistive electric water heater, standing in a hot shower during the winter for an extra second would offset half of that.

This nerd sniped me and I had to do the math to confirm, but you're right, at least depending on where you get your estimates and regional power costs. The energy equivalent between a cell phone and shower time is on the order of seconds. My phone's battery is 4385 mAh @3.7V, or 0.016 kWh, and my power costs $0.1252/kWh, or about $0.002 per phone charge. Based on some super surface-level estimates from googling, a ty…

And the parent comment said “47% wasted power … extra second … would offset half of that” and 47% of four seconds is about two, half of that is one second, so I’d say that was shockingly accurate, wow!

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#377
post #8

Motivated by this article, and already thinking about handing down my current phone to a family member as a Christmas gift, I visited the Fairphone store ( https://shop.fairphone.com/ though likely available only on Amazon in the US) and read one review ( https://www.theverge.com/23895548/fairphone-5-review-price-f... ). Here's why I'm holding off. 1. No wireless charging. Switching to this phone would require a big…

"Supporting" sustainability, but you don't accept having to plug your phone once-a-day like 90% of smartphone owners, you want to have the best phone camera in your social group, and you don't want screen protectors.

I'm shocked we have come to this as a society. If you don't accept any compromises, just admit that you don't really care and move on.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#378
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly speaking every laptop on the face of the earth, including every Apple MacBook, has a headphone jack. Speaking of Macs, many of them have very high-quality DACs and amps that can drive quality headphones. Apple has gone out of their way to make the headphone outputs very good.[1] Why then would you occupy one of your maybe two USB ports with an inferior dongle? "Not enough people complained" is a terrible metr…

Space is at a premium on mobile and water ingress is a problem, there's no licensing fees to use such a jack and the part itself is absolute peanuts to buy. The real estate they gained by getting rid of the part eventually got filled by something that's almost certainly more expensive. You don't have to overthink, you just need to think. Why permanently graft a part to a highly space optimized device when it isn't ev…

Why permanently graft a part to a highly space optimized device when it isn't even being used most of the time?

I mean, that's a valid way to view it, but I doubt it was an engineering decision first and foremost. Hanlon's razor applies: 1) Apple makes a ton of money from selling AirPods and 2) this decision was made during the Jony Ive era of "remove literally everything that is not strictly necessary just because fewer ports is more aesthetically pleasing". Under these conditions, of course they would remove the headphone jack. It's Apple doing Apple shit.

But: people used the same arguments -- less ports saves space, who needs it, etc -- to argue that the HDMI port, MagSafe, and decent keyboards would never come back. But they did, in MacBooks that were thicker than the previous generation. Sometimes you can teach old dogs new tricks.

They could have polled the market to see what it wants: release an iPhone that has a headphone jack and is slightly bigger if needed, and a slim one that doesn't have one. This will never happen, and that is my point: you or I will never know if people care, because people never had the ability to choose.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#379
post #350

Really loving my Fairphone 5 - basically smartphones are enough of a commodity now everything feels really high quality and fast physically. The sky blue colour is really nice. AND also it avoids conflict metals, is repairable. Much much better than my last Fairphone (which was the Fairphone 2). I switched from an iPhone this time. I'm also enjoying that Android is a bit more programmable without rooting it - running…

Have you tried the camera? How did you find it? I honestly don't care much about processor speed, if it can run a browser, messaging and banking apps I'm fine. But I need to be able to take family pictures which are good enough quality for occasional full page prints. I've always been disappointed with these kind of niche devices in the past, where the cameras were barely of the level of 2 year old sub-$200 phones, e…

My gf has a fairphone 5 and I guess you will be disappointed. The pictures are really not stunning. She had a huawei p20 pro (from 2018) and it definitely took better pictures.

Re: Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

#380

I never broke a phone, not even scratched the screen but I feel force to buy a new one every 3 years because they become obsolete (I guess apps require more and more memory to the point I cannot have two open at the same time, which kills my ability to pay online). I bought a Framework laptop for the same reason and I successfully managed to upgrade it, not repair it! Is there a phone that allows me to upgrade over t…

> I feel force to buy a new one every 3 years because they become obsolete

Nowadays that's plainly not true anymore because chips hardly get faster year-to-year, but also my 2012 phone lasted 5 years before software support started to get mediocre for Android 4.4 (the hardware was still fast enough and the battery you could still replace in 20 seconds). I've only ever bought new phones for software support reasons (scheduled obsolescence) or because the GPS chip broke after they stopped supporting rooting and so I couldn't get it repaired (out of warranty) without forfeiting that.

What phones do you buy that you feel they're unusably slow after only 3 years?!

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