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Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

arstechnica.com

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Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#61

Post by frollo »

jokoon wrote: post #46

So does it mean it's not possible to have popular apps like whatsapp or Tinder on this? I also wish it was just a phone with much less performance for a smaller price. I want something durable and repairable, not something fast, Wirth's law is very important to consider when consider software and hardware. I hope they will make such phone, one day, because I am not spending that much money for a phone. I bought a 150…

I've got a FP3 (so the older model) and I have had no problems with any app. I don't use Tinder, but Whatsapp works as good as on any phone I've ever owned.

As for the cheapness, I've been keeping a running tab of how much the repair is costing me vs how much it would have cost with a normal phone (ballpark estimate) and, considering the phone price, I'm currently saving about 200€, even factoring in the phone price. The biggest expense is shipping because I live in the middle of nowhere and I can easily get 10€ of shipping on a 15€ spare part (which is why I'm not replacing the protective cover even though it looks like shit).

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#62

Post by miduil »

cge wrote: post #47
miduil wrote: post #12

I really wish Fairphone 4 had GrapheneOS support, but after almost 4 years of Fairphone 3 I decided to go with a Pixel instead. Too many hardware bugs with the FP3 that were never acknowledged by the vendor and unhappy customers with bricked FP4's that requires sending them back in. Also I would have hoped for them continuing the FP3 architecture, feels such a waste that they've now instead developed a much more expe…

To add to that last point, after some time being frustrated with an FP4 and browsing the FP forums: it's not just availability of spare parts to repair shops. There doesn't appear to be a single mention in the forums of a repair shop willing to work on the FP4. There are numerous mentions of repair shops that are unwilling to, and of people being unable to find repair shops. Warranty repair is actually outsourced to…

> There doesn't appear to be a single mention in the forums of a repair shop willing to work on the FP4.

That's a good point as well, companies like Framework are doing a better job on that front (afair) with releasing detailed repair PDFs for shops that need the circuitry to debug electrical issues/replace parts. Haven't seen something from Fairphone yet.

> Apparently, for the FP4 (reportedly in a departure from some previous devices), all software development is also outsourced.

Oh, I haven't heard of that yet - till FP3 they had some significant in-house development ongoing. This would explain why FP3 will get an Android 13 upgrade (from 11) soon, while there is no announcement for Android 13 for the FP4 yet.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#63

Post by gclawes »

cge wrote: post #58

As a note about repairability, ignoring various problems with the phone: while the FP4 does have more availability of parts from the manufacturer, is generally easier to repair, and is advertised as repairable, I found the Fairphone forums to be surprisingly and unexpectedly hostile to discussions of repair and repairability. A significant portion of the forum userbase considers that Fairphone's primary focus is on f…

I'd buy a Framework phone in an instant...

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#64

Post by londons_explore »

morsch wrote: post #50
londons_explore wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All modern smartphones have masses of proprietary stuff to turn gigabytes of raw data from the sensor into a beautiful photo. If you want an opensource phone, you end up with crappy photos unless you have a camera team of 500 people to rewrite that stuff, and a big team of lawyers to deal with all the patent licensing you're going to have to do for the techniques you use.

I'm not sure that it's truly all down to software, but as far as it is, you don't have start at zero -- there are excellent, competitive raw photo processors available as free software, like darktable and RawTherapee. Still a lot of work, though, no doubt.

heh - no.

Camera stacks on modern phones process many raw frames to make a single photo - sometimes as many as 100.

Collecting those frames is done in a second or so before and after the user clicks the shutter button. Thats a data rate of ~15 Gigabits - far faster than most phones can write to storage - and anyway would you be happy for each photo to take a few gigabytes of storage space until it was processed?

Therefore, the raw data needs to be processed (or at least preprocessed) in realtime. You can't store it and do it later.

And to do that, you typically need custom silicon - all the big phone manufacturers have ASICs dedicated to image processing.

And to make the trouble even worse, you often need to use data from some of the raw frames to adjust camera parameters for the next frame - for example adjusting amplifier gains. See patent US9196027B2 for an example of the sort of thing that is done 'in the loop'.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#65

Post by stevezsa8 »

dimitar wrote: post #35
stevezsa8 wrote: post #33

This is cool and all... I just wish someone would release a device with user replaceable battery and better OS update policies. Basically a pixel with slightly easier repair. I think the modular aspect is cool, but seems like a gimmick that would be prone to failure. Just my opinion anyway.

I have a Fairphone 4 and I can replace the batter and upgrade the OS (a choice of multiple ones is available)

I was tempted after a colleague got the FP4. In the end I decided to get a pixel 6a for half the price.

I'm taking a bet on not smashing the handset. €300 extra was just too much for a replaceable battery. Atleast for my usecase.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#66

Post by amelius »

gclawes wrote: post #63
cge wrote: post #58

As a note about repairability, ignoring various problems with the phone: while the FP4 does have more availability of parts from the manufacturer, is generally easier to repair, and is advertised as repairable, I found the Fairphone forums to be surprisingly and unexpectedly hostile to discussions of repair and repairability. A significant portion of the forum userbase considers that Fairphone's primary focus is on f…

I'd buy a Framework phone in an instant...

Yes. But what OS would it run out of the box? And what would you run on it?

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#67

Post by martin_a »

putlake wrote: post #2

The US already has a repairable, sustainable smartphone. It's called Teracube. https://myteracube.com/ 4-yr warranty, stock Android.

Opening that website greets me with an alert() with the message: error; [object Object]

If their phones do work as good as that... Well...

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#68

Post by ben-schaaf »

TheMode wrote: post #39
ben-schaaf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides not making smartphones what do you think the actual root problem is and how would you tackle it?

I believe that the root problems are programs having direct access to environment, being compiled down to hardware instructions, and these instructions not being easily interpretable (without having access to an already made interpreter) These problems cause software to depend on highly specific platforms [1] that prevent any hardware from being standalone-ly sustainable. * Environment access creates the opportunity…

> In other word, my suggestion would be to create a new target platform that compile down to a very understandable instruction set and leave environment access out of the spec

This is already the case. The vast complexity of modern software and hardware comes from the ever more complex environment they interact with.

If you take a nice small instruction set - leaving environment access out of the spec, and then attach device specific cameras, modems, displays, sensors, accelerators, etc. and then build an OS with a web browser and apps that interact with all the extra hardware. What you've invented is the modern smart phone. It runs on ARM - an easily interpretable instruction set.

Discord not running on older phones is entirely due to them depending on newer operating system APIs. It's not the instructions that changed, the environment did.

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#69

Post by cge »

miduil wrote: post #62
cge wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that last point, after some time being frustrated with an FP4 and browsing the FP forums: it's not just availability of spare parts to repair shops. There doesn't appear to be a single mention in the forums of a repair shop willing to work on the FP4. There are numerous mentions of repair shops that are unwilling to, and of people being unable to find repair shops. Warranty repair is actually outsourced to…

> There doesn't appear to be a single mention in the forums of a repair shop willing to work on the FP4. That's a good point as well, companies like Framework are doing a better job on that front (afair) with releasing detailed repair PDFs for shops that need the circuitry to debug electrical issues/replace parts. Haven't seen something from Fairphone yet. > Apparently, for the FP4 (reportedly in a departure from som…

>That's a good point as well, companies like Framework are doing a better job on that front (afair) with releasing detailed repair PDFs for shops that need the circuitry to debug electrical issues/replace parts. Haven't seen something from Fairphone yet.

A frustrating thing is that Fairphone actually has released quite detailed information for the FP4 [1], I think to a significantly greater extent than Framework. It just doesn't actually seem to have developed a real culture of repair around it, or developed any real connections with independent repair shops beyond just putting up a detailed PDF, that isn't necessarily easy to find, on their website.

[1]: https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FP4_Inf...

Re: Fairphone 4 is coming to the US

#70

Post by zerox7felf »

jokoon wrote: post #46

So does it mean it's not possible to have popular apps like whatsapp or Tinder on this? I also wish it was just a phone with much less performance for a smaller price. I want something durable and repairable, not something fast, Wirth's law is very important to consider when consider software and hardware. I hope they will make such phone, one day, because I am not spending that much money for a phone. I bought a 150…

I have been using a FP4 for about a year with /e/-os, and it has been pretty ok so far. I don't use many (if any) of the /e/-os cloud features, so can't speak for those. Other apps have been working fine w/ microG and the custom app store (which combines the play store and fdroid). The only issue I can think of off the top of my head is google translate not working. Other Gapps (Gmail, yt, lens, etc) seem to work fine, as do pretty much all others I have tried. Unsure how well in-app purchases work. Some /e/-os apps have UI quirks... But nothing is worse than "ok" in my view. Ymmv.

Not sure I buy that lightweight phones would necessarily be better for the environment? Surely repairability is key?

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