The new fairphone 5 came out, it looks cool but the price is really, really high…
If it’s a phone that can really last 10 years it could be good, but is that true? Is it worth it? I could get the one with /e/os from Murena because i want a degoogled phone with a bootloader locked, but is it usable on a daily basis?
If you’re serious about privacy and can tolerate apple stuff, get an iphone. If you’re serious about privacy and would prefer android you’re pretty much stuck with one of the pixel phones and graphene.
I went with an iphone last time I made this choice. The degree of difference wasn’t enough for me and I keep an android device for stuff that requires it anyway. Your mileage may vary but my recommendation is to get the device with the widest install base if you want it to last. Something’s gonna break but getting parts will be easier for idk a nexus 5 or iphone se than a blue branded tablet.
Hopefully I’m not too late to say this: I would strongly caution against buying a Fairphone. My mum got a new Fairphone 3 in early 2021. Earlier this year, just after the phone went out of warranty, the USB-C port stopped working. The replacement bottom module was out of stock, it’s been out of stock for months, and the forums are full of people complaining that it’s been mostly out of stock since 2021. Fairphone claimed that they would have stock back by the end of August, and as of today, that is not true. This phone was supposed to have spare parts available through to 2025.
Did you read the comment you replied to? Fairphone may be well-intentioned but their promises don’t mean much when they can’t even fully support the phones they have out now
I believe that the price is reasonable overall: it has good specs and now that FP is an established brand you know it won’t go out of business and support will last. /e/OS has become good enough lately to be reliable to daily drive (it requires some initial adjustment, but nothing to be worried about).
Also, they are phones that withhold their value in the secondary market: a used FP3+ on ebay costs more than 400€ and it had a launch price of 439€, so you can easily sell them for a good price if you ever change your mind about owning one.
The only thing that makes me hesitant to buy one is the fact that now the EU is pushing a lot of consumer friendly laws, like mandatory USB-C, replaceable batteries, extended software support and so on… So in two or three years the smartphone market might offer more high-end products that are long lasting and have a more accessible price tag. It only depends on how much time can you wait.
Still using my 6 yo Pixel 2 XL with a custom rom. Not planning to change and I easily see how I can get to 10 years. For instance, the repairability allowed me to change a cracked screen, as it would be possible with the Fairphone.
Downscale your needs and you can easily do 10 years in my opinion!
I don’t know dude, you can downscale your needs all you want but if you drop your phone on the ground and break the screen you can only hope there are third party manufacturer that still produces it or you can toss it away.
I am thinking it is. I cannot find one decent phone with a great ultrawide camera AND a SD card slot, both in one phone. And I mean flagship grade, when I mean great. I maintain manually on paper a list of good ultrawide phones, and the list across the whole price range barely has 20ish phones, most of which happen to be $1500 flagships.
I can forego the 3.5 jack (unfortunate) and compromise with a dongle, but the expandable storage and ultrawide are impossible to compromise. There is only Honor 90 and Nothing Phone 2, that fit the ultrawide criteria with a decent price, but they do not give SD card slot either.
People shitting on it are finding arbitrary reasons, I think. The 3.5 jack exclusion may be “ethically” not in line, but sure as hell tell me one phone that fits the above criteria.
And before someone pops in to tell me Pixel has good camera, no, the camera hardware is simply superior on FP5, and loading GCam on it will be a non-issue. FP5 with GCam is probably the best midrange ultrawide on the market alongside Honor 90.
Edit: most of the ultrawide phones on the market today have the exact same 8 megapixel 1/4.0" UW sensor as that on my Huawei P30 Lite from 4 years ago. And let me tell you, if I do not click in RAW, that ultrawide is a potato. I need upgrade, not a forsake sidegrade. Ultrawide camera is the biggest differentiator among smartphones across the whole price range.
To me it doesn’t look like that long a time for another revolutionary piece of tech to make its way, but what do you think would be the next big thing?
It might not be. Consider that moore’s law is coming to an end. I fully expect more and more products to be cloud based and ai based. I don’t think ai can run on our phone even in the near future. Battery is another issue, you can’t afford to run too much stuff on it.
We as consumers now need to adjust to the ending moore’s law.
That’s not the question. There is no singular reason to buy the Fairphone 5 and a purchase is not necessarily a commitment to a full 8 - 10 years of use. Focusing solely on one aspect of the device, like its modular components or the long-term software support, is missing the bigger picture.
OP wants to know if fairphone will last 10 years. The retort is that even if you can have a phone that is supported for 10 years, you won’t want to use it that long.
Even if they use it for 5 years and then move to something else, it still offers benefits that very few modern phones have. And it’s still the most ethical by an absolute mile. You don’t need to use a Fairphone for the entire support period for it to become a worthwhile purchase.
The newer hardware tends to usually have a longer lifespan. A 10-year old computer today is a 3rd or 4th gen Core i7, still decently powerful. A 10-year old computer 10 years ago was a Pentium 4, pretty much useless.
Same will apply to phones. I had an S5 that I bought in 2014 which by 2019 actually was getting too old, hobbled by it’s paltry 2GB of RAM. Bought an S8 in 2019 which already was 2 years old and it’s already outlived the S5 by almost 2 years. It’s starting to show signs of age but will probably last at least another couple years. I’m expecting the S22/S23 Ultra to last into the 2030s.
Most of that progression was made in the first 5 years, the last 5 years for new phone tech have been a lot slower. I don’t know if any spec in the next 5 will really make me want to upgrade, stuff just works atm
I feel like we reached the stage where any improvements are really just incremental and small, you used to get a massively different experience when upgrading your phone even just a year later in the early days, nowadays you can barely tell the difference between new and 5 year old models.
When we get in that state of a technology, we should definitely be looking at how to make our devices last longer instead of renewing yearly / bi-yearly.
When we get in that state of a technology, we should definitely be looking at how to make our devices last longer instead of renewing yearly / bi-yearly.
Won’t somebody please think of the children profits?
the same number of cores, though undoubtedly faster
four times the ram
2 to 32 times the storage
Not that impressive for ten years of development to be honest. In addition to that there are limits to what is required for everyday usage. Not to make a “640k should be enough for everybody”, but browser and messaging only requires a few GB of RAM and will do so for the foreseeable future. 8GB is future proof enough for the vast majority of use cases.
I have 2TB of storage in my PC. The actually important part (documents and programs) take up minuscule amounts of space. The remainder is for AI models, movies and games, all of which I could delete and download again.
It won’t be as good as native hardware support, but you can buy a device to add wireless charging. It plugs into the phone USB-C and has a short flexible cable leading into a thin (1 mm maybe) wireless charger receiver that can fit inside a phone case
Yeah, had one of these for previous phones,but most don’t fit properly with cases and if you need to properly charge the phone you are always fiddling around. Was not really satisfied with them.
I bought the FP3, then upgraded it to an FP3+ when the camera broke. Never had as much fun with a phone before or since. It has been my daily driver for years and it did everything well enough, if a bit slow. My friends either get new phones or use them despite visible damage because they can’t fix them. Now I ordered the FP5 to have the 3+ as a backup and test setup and I am confident I will use the FP5 for 3-6 years again :)
Fairphones are like an odd car: There are sleeker, faster, cheaper and maybe just better alternatives around. However you still like it and just learn where to hit it with a hammer when it starts making funny noises. If you can afford it and like odd devices, it’s for you.
Do not buy preloaded LineageOS or /e/ OS phones or any Android phones without proper Verified Boot support and firmware updates. These devices also have no way for you to check whether they’ve been tampered with.> from privacyguides.org
Any of these “verified boot” phones ever get tested against million dollar Cellebrite kits, or is it just custom ROM hobbyist developer assurance that there is full bootloader protection against Evil Maid and such attacks?
That isn’t an official GrapheneOS channel, it’s called PrivacyPhones. I doubt it’s a person involved with GrapheneOS trying to spread FUD or something. You could always go make questions on the official chatrooms.
The same forum where Micay’s lies about swatting, years of claims of harassment and numerous other deeds are censored, not allowed to be questioned for evidence, and handed over bans for? Every such person affiliated with or bearing their logo has always, without exception, has ended up being either a member or benefiting party, throughout the years. Last year they even sent one spy in my r/privatelife Matrix chatroom (ryan97) to stalk me for months, until I kicked him out over his malicious attitude, only to find later that he was their plant siphoning all of my private chatroom’s chat logs.
Nice, I got a renewed one from Amazon this year for $330. It was as good as new, no scratches whatsoever, battery health was at 99% and still had 3 months of warranty left.
It might be expensive when you compare it to the lifetime of a regular phone, but compare it to what you’d spend instead on regular phones within the potential lifetime of 7-8 years of the FP5 (minus 1-2 minor repairs).
This does not only depend on the hardware’s lifespan but the software itself too. If there is no longtime support the average user might be better of using a more recent phone where all apps will work and there are not that much security issues.
Well they can promise updates yes. But they are limited on the android version to the manufacturer of the chips. The company shift which has a similar concept as Fairphone currently suffers from that problem: they cannot upgrade their shift5me to a higher version than android 8 and a lot of apps recently dropped their support to older android versions (e.g. banking apps)
Fairphone have been dealing with this problem of unsupported chips for quite some years now (the hardest lesson learned was probably selecting Mediatek for the FP1) and they’ve become better and better at it - up to the point, that they chose not a mobile, but an IoT SoC for the FP5 for which they got Qualcomm to commit to much longer support than ever before. I don’t see why reason, why they shouldn’t manage to stick to this commitment in this case. On top of that, they’re even working with Qualcomm to allow for replacable SoCs for future upgrades without having to replace the whole mainboard incl. storage etc.
Also no one is talking about that fact that it’s fair as in equitable. Like everyone who worked to make it got paid, which is not something you can say about any of the big phone makes AFAIK.
It’s not bad, it’s just that it’s an Android phone like any other. It doesn’t claim to be more “private”. It would be approximately the same amount of work to degoogle as any other Android phone.
Every Fairphone to date (perhaps not the original) has had support for custom operating systems, on behalf of both the Fairphone developers and community developers at large. The Fairphone 4 is one of the most widely supported modern devices and there is no reason to think this will suddenly change with the 5.
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