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Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

fairphone.com

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Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#71
post #60
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and I'd prefer to not have to take it out all the time. Especially since taking out the SD card means also taking out the SIM card.

Is wireless connectivity a barrier there? My home WiFi goes about twice as fast as USB 2.0.

My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way.

For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again.

When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and connect with CX File Manager. My handheld has USB 3.0 but I don’t find that plugging in a cable is particularly convenient, especially since the NAS box is in my closet.

My iPhone 17 Pro Max has very fast USB-C but I’ve never used it for anything besides charging. I’m sure professional content creation folks know of a workflow where fast USB is helpful but for my smartphone user I can’t think of a reason to use it.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#72
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See, that's all fine and dandy, but I would not recommend this phone to normal people anyway - especially with their record of introducing random bugs. Their whole strategy is going after niche buyers. Most people just want a phone and go through their carrier or Apple.

I have a friend who was looking into the phone and he was about to purchase it before I mentioned the port, but yes we are just geeks.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#73
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, Apple has nearly the same design.

Yeah, I should criticize them for it too. Though the issue rarely occurs for me on iPhones I think the reason is that the volume buttons are much higher up on the iPhone. So when you do the movement one-handed where the left side rests on your palm and you use a finger to press the power button, the palm doesn't hit volume-down, which does happen on FP6 since the volume buttons are much lower on the side.

It still happened all the time on the FP6 for me after 2 months or so.

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

Fairphone has been around since 2013 and all of their models have been plagued by really bad software and hardware issues. I think part of the problem is that the actual hardware and software development is not done by them, but a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile). For clarity, this is not a "everybody produces phones in China". If you look at their Git trees, most commits are from this Chinese ODM. I guess this introduces a delay in fixing issues plus Fairphone is probably just one of their customers.

Also, for anyone worried about security, yes it uses opaque binary blobs of Chinese origin (camera processing stuff by TCL). Well, that aside from usually being months to years behind on Qualcomm firmware blob versions (who do monthly security bulletins) and Linux kernel sources. So Fairphones typically have many known high/critical CVEs.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I'd prefer to not have to take it out all the time. Especially since taking out the SD card means also taking out the SIM card.

Is wireless connectivity a barrier there? My home WiFi goes about twice as fast as USB 2.0. My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way. For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again. When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and c…

The app I use to sync, Musicbee, doesn't work on Linux, so I have to use Wine, which for stupid reasons prevents me from syncing wirelessly. Just syncing the files isn't the problem. Syncing the metadata (number of times a song has been played, favourites) is the problem, and just dragging-and-dropping the the files onto my phone doesn't solve for this.

If I could do it wirelessly, I would, but I've never found it to be reliable in the first place the few times I've used it before (times may have changed).

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#75
post #67
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is that link?

The evolution of low effort copy+paste LLM response. Now Google can track everyone who wants that information and people can be just as rude as before when they copy+pasted LLM responses into conversations, but now it's sly.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

And yet GrapheneOS is better at everything that /e/ claims.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#77

The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer. AI-like typing detected.

It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?

[deleted]

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#78
post #59

"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled." https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...

One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.

Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#79

The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer. AI-like typing detected.

I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters

I’m not. I’m tired of trying to parse this crap.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#80
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnersh…

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.

>I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem

I used to feel a bit similarly. But I've since realized they are one of the very few software projects that actually make sensible privacy and security choices.

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