Live data from Hacker News

Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

fairphone.com

61–70 of 239 posts

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#61
post #55
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.

that said, Fairphones habe a micro SD card slot which you can use for such things

Having to remove your SIM card (since it uses the same tray) and potentially switch off your phone to transfer files at a decent speed is meh.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how do people copy edit this and not notice? I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.

Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.

Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#63
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.

Unfortunately, there were quite a lot early reports of users whose FP6 volume buttons broke or their logic boards during charging. Both are components that are not user-replaceable and it often takes Fairphone 4-6 weeks to repair them. Similarly, the head band on their FairBuds XL regularly break for a bunch of people (user replaceable, but you still have to go through their slow support if you do not want to pay for…

> And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.

To be fair, Apple has nearly the same design.

> I got it because I like their mission

Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#64
post #39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for. How? In what way? Source?

https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using...

June 2025

Someone else shared the up to date info about this feature: https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text

> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service through an anonymising proxy, so it required a Murena Workspace Premium subscription and an internet connection.

> The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#65
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features: > Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us. I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.

Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.

You can stick to your morals without blowing things out of proportion.

“We are the only acceptable way to do things and no tradeoffs are acceptable” is fairly petty.

“We have a difference of opinion” isn’t.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how do people copy edit this and not notice? I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.

Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.

$0.10 for a marketing blurb isn’t exactly throwing away tokens, and if it conforms to society’s expectations then probably worth the spend.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#67
post #21
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that still a thing? I can’t think of a phone here in Europe that you can’t just put a SIM card from any carrier in and it will work.

Because the United States sucks in regards to mobile phone compatibility and spectrum allocation. https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ

What is that link?

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#68
post #6

Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.

The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…

To which device are you referring?

The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs.

https://us.fairphone.com/carrier-compatibility

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#69
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder! I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways

You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...

There are only 264 replies in that forum total, and not every reply is a unique individual.

I would say that it’s easy to make an argument that this is quite an insignificant number of users even for a niche smartphone manufacturer. I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop. I would be surprised if the percent of smartphone users who do that eclipsed 0.5%.

My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#70
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.

I have a fairphone 5 and actively don't like it when it asks me if I want to mirror my screen when I plug it into a charging cable attached to a monitor.

That's an issue that would be solved with a better UX on Fairphone's side though, not removing the feature entirely.
Post reply on HN