INFO!!! fairphone DOES SUPPORT CUSTOM ROMS!!!
i like the idea of a fairphone. i dun wana buy one tho - if it doesn hav the features i need/wan.
if fairphone had all dis stuff - it would hav a genuine moat, besides the sustainability stff-
alternative image link (blahaj zone)
Features ‘people’ want? Like being able to easily use the device, have a decent battery life, a good set of apps, built in security and not having to care AT ALL about most of things mentioned in that meme?
I don’t get what’s mentioned either. Fairphone literally partners with Murena /e/OS, other ROMs are also flashable on the device. What “people” want is to buy and be happy though, and their partnership does just that for at least the EU.
The only thing that’s both a fair argument and something I commonly hear from average users is that a 3.5mm audio jack indeed would be nice. By now USB-C to 3.5mm cables with built-in DAC (which also work on any PC, very handy) are available for less than 10€ though, so it’s absolutely more of a “nice to have” thing.
What I want from fairphone:
- Take security and long-term support seriously
If people, not only lemmy’s people and a small minority care about the jack people would buy phones with jacks, there are good options but very few people do.
Most people actually like and prefere bluethooth.
Same for ROMs, when was the last time you said “wow, I sure miss custom roms” and the whole room went “meeetooo”. Hell, most people don’t even know what a custom rom is.
This is not what “the people want” is “what lemmy thinks everyone ones, but is actually only them circle jerking”.
Downvote me to hell, but is the truth.
Well i know a lot of people irl who miss the headphone jack and none are lemmy users and not all are nerds
I know a lot of people who don’t, so? Anecdotal information.
We don’t have independant studies in this debate afaik sor anecdotal info is relevant here
i said in the post “to get me interested”, not “to get the majority of people interested”.
It says clearly down to the right “Focus on features people want”.
Not sure I get the point of dual Sims when esims are a thing.
ESims (at least on GrapheneOs) require google play services
This post really resonates with me and I’ve already said my piece about jack removal and BT buds arriving at the same time by FP.
The realization I came to is that FP is not an enthusiast brand and doesn’t want to be; it is not the Framework of phones.
They cater to the broadest market segment, they want to be the repairable Samsung, rather. And it shows.
Is there any brand that does want to be the Framework of phones?
Xiaomi and OnePlus used to be. Repairability, cheap(er), good specs, reliable. Now Xiaomis are stupidly unreliable and practically not bl-unlockable and OnePlus is starting to block bl unlocking in some regions, they don’t allow avb-yellow and are expensive as shit. Nowy maybe nothing if we ignore the light bullshit.
Used to have a OnePlus Nord. Broke the screen 3 years after the phone released and there were no replacement parts anywhere, besides a single AliExpress seller. It didn’t make things better that they released multiple versions of the same model, most, if not all, had incompatible screens.
The screen protectors for both Nord and 8T were out of stock less than a year after the phones were released, never to be seen again.
They were able to capture various national markets by competing on being favorable to consumer wants, now that they have a strong foothold, or straight up control whole markets, they get to juice their profits.
I’ve recently come across this: https://www.shift.eco/en/shiftphone-8/. Unfortunately also no headphone jack… But when my current phone breaks this might be the phone to get, for me at least.
Damn, the is so sick… except for the missing jack. What a bummer :(
Interesting. Any idea how compatible it would be with US mobile networks? I’m currently using Mint/T-Mobile (not Verizon, which is notoriously incompatible) but every time I’ve found an EU phone that looks appealing in the past compatibility was always a possible concern so I never got any.
I don’t speak German and after some searching I am still not sure. Most of the results are full of speculative/preview type info and focused on performance.
I think I’ve heard them being fully compatible (would be surprised if they weren’t), but I might be wrong.
TLDR - focus on features people want.
You think people don’t want accessories…?
naw- i agree, peeps want accessories. i was just mad that they made the backplate accessorie so that even the basic bavkplate has screws on the back… which triggers somthin evil in me - iduno-
Been using Fairphone 5 with /e/OS and I’m fully content with it. I’m sure your critique is fair, and they could do better on several fronts. Still I’m very happy to support this company, and I’ve not seen anything on the market that seems to do better overall than fairphone, according to what I value that is. It feels good to contribute to ‘an alternative’. I can’t help but see regular smartphones as a disease that try to colonize your brain and reduce you to a remote-controlled zombie. I don’t feel that way with the Fairphone. I see most of it’s limitations as a blessing in disguise. None of this is to refute anything you’re saying, it’s just trying to balance it out with some genuine love for Fairphone. :)
I straight up refuse to ever buy bt headphones. I never really had a desire to use them, and having them as the only option pisses off some deep part of my soul that hates the power being exerted for such a selfish reason.
I just don’t listen to audio on my phone without playing it through a wireless speaker, or playing it through the built in speaker(in private of course). I honestly don’t miss it, instead finding other ways to pass the time around other people.
hates the power being exerted for such a selfish reason.
I just don’t listen to audio on my phone without playing it through a wireless speaker, or playing it through the built in speaker.
You do realize that playing music on anything but a tiny speaker requires more power than BT+headphones? Even playing it loud in the built-in speakers can be note wasteful than later versions of Bluetooth.
Bluetooth transmission power costs are insignificant. But you don’t need to justify preferring the option to have regular wired earbuds on a phone.
well played
I’ve been forced to resort to them since it seems pin on my power port that handles audio signal has failed.
I hate playing stuff I’m listening to on speakers, even in private, I just always feel like someone else might be around, and I don’t want to annoy them, or even worse, have them judge me. It just makes me uncomfortable.
As a firm believer in wired headphones: you can buy an adapter to plug your 3.5mm in the USB-C. IMO it’s not ideal, but they’re small pieces and you can keep them connected to your headphones at all times, so you don’t even have to think about bringing them with you.
Personally, I made a 3.5mm jack non-negotiable for my phone, which severely limited my options. Next time I’ll probably have to get an adapter… :(
I would add proper Linux mainline support here.
That would allow other non-android options as well, and makes it be supported for the near future. And will likely have a network effect, allowing other phones with similar hardware to be supported as well.
Mainline Linux support is a chipset feature, the manufacturer has little control over it. And even then, you have manufacturers like Mediatek that theoretically have full mainline support, but the bootloader is totally locked and no custom ROMs exist.
Most mainlining effort is financed by the people that build products with it, not the chipset vendors. Chipset vendors are only interested in providing a working demo application, not much more. If someone promises 8 years maintenance, they could also in parallel work on mainline support, so that it can continue to be supported.
About locked bootloaders, sure you need to be able to unlock them as well, but that often also is a decision of the product manufacturers, not the chipset vendors.
If a manufacturer wants to lock the bootloader, they can, true. But sometimes, you have phones in the same family where the Qualcomm chipset supports unlocking and the Mediatek one doesn’t. E.g. Xiaomi before they restricted unlocking further.
Don’t mistake correleation and causation. I don’t know the specifics, but bootloaders are software and socs are hardware. The bootloaders keys are fused into the hardware, so that only that bootloaders can boot. When you buy a soc, no keys are fused in, this happens at the manufacturer factory deployment process. The bootloaders can then decide if the device supports an ‘unlocked’ state, and displays the warnings if unlocked. The bootloaders are build and configured by the manufacturer. However, the soc vendors will give the product vendors a SDK containing tested sources and configuration for their soc.
Here is what could explain your observation, manufacturer is lazy and doesn’t care to change the default configuration of the bootloader. And the default configuration of Mediatek and Qualcomm SDKs are different.
There is a semi-recent thread about Mediatek at https://www.reddit.com/r/PocoPhones/comments/1cuwkm0/lies_about_mediatek/ where it started that their source code is incomplete, they don’t provide it at all. Hence no manufacturer can mainline it. And this is one of the reasons custom ROM development for them is so slow compared to Qualcomm SOCs.
Honestly, I still like what they do have. Not having to deal with a service center and being able to easily replace my own battery or charging port when something goes tits up.
But it does really sting that there just isn’t any phone that comes close to approaching what I want.
Honestly I don’t even really care about having a flagship level SOC. I don’t need a processor that can run more sophisticated programs. So long as it loads web pages and plays media, at most runs a doc like program, I’m quite happy.
But given that my main use case is media, I’d really like to have something where I can listen to stuff, not using speakers, not having to worry about the charge on a Bluetooth device, and be able to have my phone charging at the same time. Like, there are those splitter dongles but I’ve found them to be just such a head ache to use, inconsistent in their function, and so easy to lose or break.
Also the fact that FP are kind of hard to get where I live is annoying, but, that’s hardly the fault of FP.
I know this is a shitty ask (and impossible atm), but like a 1" periscope camera (or any decent zoom snapper) for me pls :(.
That and actual Linux.
Same here, I can’t go back to carrying a camera everywhere, that’s dangerous
Off topic but I really like your style of drawing, it’s cute.
^_^The missing 3.5mm Headphone jack hurts so much :(
yesyis, also my biggest gripe ;(((
if i cud jus hook up my good lil headponies - like - i wud keep that phone for however long i cud keep it-
Removed by mod
becuz i wana-
Removed by mod
A 3.5mm to USBC converter really does cost less than a coffee… Was probably not made with ethical labour tho
I always see this argument but I really don’t want anything plugged into anything as important as the USB-C port while the phone is in my pocket.
3.5 plugs are rather short outside of the phone (at least for headphones with 90deg plugs) to minimize leverage that you put on the port. Being able to rotate also means less stress on the port as well.
The USB-C adapters are pretty short, but lack the rotation. I have replaced USB-C ports in dozens of Nintendo Switches and other devices, it is pretty clear they aren’t designed to take much stress.
Long story short if anything happens I would much rather have the 3.5mm pin stuck in a headphone jack than breaking the USB-C port and making it so my phone is a brick.
Totally valid. My fairphone USB port broke after a few years. Took a £20 part and ten minutes to fix, but it’s definitely still an issue with USB C.
However, 3.5mm to USB-C adapters are not passive, they’re active. They need a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) to generate audio signals from the digital data stream that comes from the USB-C.
Phones didn’t use to have very good DACs (with exceptions, of course), but they’re still normally better than whatever you get from a 3€ adapter.
Adapters are also less convenient than a headphone jack, because now you need to remember taking the adapter and the headphones with you.
However, 3.5mm to USB-C adapters are not passive, they’re active. They need a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) to generate audio signals from the digital data stream that comes from the USB-C.
There are entirely passive adapters, but they’ll only work if the phone has the necessary hardware of course.
I’d consider that if they added a second USB port, but no. Why would anyone want to use headphones while their phone is plugged in?
I use a dongle and get better audio quality than I ever had on an integrated jack. I really don’t care if a phone has the jack. If I want something compact on the go, I use bluetooth ears. If I want to listen to high quality audio, I use the dongle with a quality DAC with proper headphones.
“focus on feature people want” crowd when you tell them you don’t want a headphone jack: Downvote, your opinion doesn’t matter.
Edit to add on your point: using a DAC or Bluetooth and I have better sound audio than an abused jack that is the first thing to break on my phones. Plus no cable to annoy me and get tangled everywhere.
I understand some people don’t want to move on but they then act like there is such a huge market for it and that everybody should want one. Spoiler: the market says no, if it was a differentiator for sales more phones would have one.Removed by mod
Fairphone has sources available for it and an unlockable bootloader. There are nightly builds of Lineage already available for the FP6
And you can buy it with /e/OS prwinstalled which is a custom degoogled rom of android
postmarketOS also has rudimentary support for the FP6
I feel like most of these are at least misleading if not outright false (or maybe I’m misunderstanding them, so please correct me if I do).
- Allow custom ROMs: It does, and there is even a Google-free variant they sell on their store.
- Dual SIM and SD card slot: There may not be dual slots, but there is Dual SIM (one physical, one eSIM), and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a phone with multiple SD card slots.
- Programmable “moments” button: The button is not programmable per se, but there are different settings to make it do different things.
- No dumb accessories: If you don’t find them useful, don’t buy them?
- Headphone jack: Fair enough, I do miss that one, but the USB-C with an adapter works okay, and I’m still using the same headphones that I’ve used for years.
Headphone jack: Fair enough, I do miss that one, but the USB-C with an adapter works okay, and I’m still using the same headphones that I’ve used for years.
I do this as well, but I would also like to charge the phone while I have my headphones connected to it, and all these additional adapter chains often don’t work very reliable, and are much more cumbersome to deal with.
Dual SIM and SD card slot: There may not be dual slots, but there is Dual SIM (one physical, one eSIM), and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a phone with multiple SD card slots.
Still, I prefer 2 physical slots. Some phones also have Dual SIM + eSIM, where 2 of them can be active at a time.
My current phone has Dual SIM + SD. I have all three populated, on of them with 9esim adapter. Removable eSIM. Easy to replace, and stores multiple profiles.As for the second thing: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2016/01/hands-on-with-the-saygus-v2-smartphone.html
I currently have four eSIMs on my phone. I would love nothing more than to get rid of the last remaining physical SIM.
Ideally, also get rid of the whole slot to improve water resistance.
I would MUCH rather they focus on optimisation and power efficiency. My work iPhone can easily last two days on a single charge, three if I’m not really using it that much, all the while giving me all the processing power I’d need to run high-quality games on it. No Android phones comes anywhere near this and it grinds my gears.
All I’m saying is: different people, different needs.
I currently have 6 eSIMs, but on a removable eUICC. If the phone breaks, I can immediately put it into another phone and use it. Mine even has STK menu for switching and renaming profiles, so it also works in most dumb phones.
Plus all that is free. In my country, eSIM profile download codes are single use, and you pay for them. Swan is €8, O2 €10, Orange €10, only Telekom does it for free.
But yeah, in my case, that could easily mean having to pay upwards of €60 just to put the fucking SIM cards into another phone.Oh, fun fact, I wanted to try one plan at Orange, but screw it. The physical SIM is free, including shipping to home, but for eSIM they wanted €10.25 (while the plan would be €20/mo), and I don’t have empty slots for them.
Meh, average carrier shenanigans. Ereyesterday I wrote to my carrier about being unable to make phone calls, they replied me to call them to “continue the case” after unsuccessfully (who could have guessed) trying to call me. Bro…
At least somebody probably understood what just happened, so they emailed me.Well, guess your last sentence works.
I currently have 6 eSIMs, but on a removable eUICC.
Are you able to have two of them enabled at the same time, or is there a limit to one, since it treats it like a SIM card?
Plus all that is free. In my country, eSIM profile download codes are single use, and you pay for them. Swan is €8, O2 €10 (…) The physical SIM is free, including shipping to home, but for eSIM they wanted €10.25
Wow, that’s insane!
I wrote to my carrier about being unable to make phone calls, they replied me to call them to “continue the case” after unsuccessfully (who could have guessed) trying to call me. Bro…
Was that LycaMobile?
At least somebody probably understood what just happened, so they emailed me.
Ah, never mind, not Lyca after all. These fuckers close FOUR CASES that I raised after failing to contact me, when I was reporting not being able to take calls.
I currently have 6 eSIMs, but on a removable eUICC.
dual sim slot phones were very common in some markets where you needed to have multiple carriers. It’s a lot less common now that eSIM exists, but before then it was a common thing for the EU version of a phone to have dual sim slots when the NA versions were only single sim.
It still is pretty common, but they typically do hybrid slots, so either a SIM or SD card.
ur right bout the first two… i updated the posts content becuz of it (som hours ago)
but the accessories - see - i like the idea, bzt sadly they opted for a screw-on desgin… which then made the phone have two black screws on the back, in places where ur fingers would be… whivh spawns a big uncomfy feeling in me - so its mostly a personal thing-
but yes, ur points r very valid n i agree.
How did you hold one in your hands?? Is there a fair phone store?
Possibly held a friend’s phone.
