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Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts

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  • I respect your opinion, but I lived through 90s computing and think dongles died the death they deserve and these phone manufacturers can go to hell for bringing them back or thinking that bluetooth audio is good enough.

    Additionally most of the droids I have bought that have a jack are the perfect thickness in my mind. Weighted enough to stay in my hand and take a couple dozen drops without accident. Plus the headphone jack is used as an antenna and provides radio capabilities so I can listen to local news instead of whatever the tech industry wants to feed me. Which is a nice option.

    It depends on what dongle and for what it is used, for something like headphones or earbuds I just leave my dongle on the cable, the same for in my car. I used a Redmi Note 13 Pro for a while which has an audio jack, but it was TERRIBLE so bad that I bought extra dongles before I switched back to using an iPhone.

    I also already dispise looking for an Android phone, since I have terrible experience with Samsung Phones and Google products and don't want either of those. Having to look for a GOOD audio jack on one is not worth the hassle for me, if it is for you then more kudo's to you.

    Ill just use an old school iPod or a USB-c cable

  • Just out of interest, because I too love the jack, then what are you buying in the future?

    I have no idea, I'm hoping for my F3 to still last a couple of years.
    I'm honestly pretty tired of Android, and that's another can of worms.
    Maybe I'll try with a linux phone, but I'm still undecided.

  • Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don't mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.

    And now let's be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.

    The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.

    Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is "Fair materials: 76%", which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of "focus materials" to push up the number.

    The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% "fair" materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That's all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You'll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It's just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.

    Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.

    With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.

    Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
    It's fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn't even read the report.

  • Ok but what about a headphone jack ?

    Yeah I find a fairphone 3 to be powerful enough so I might just keep repairing it

  • Wirelessly.

    FairPhone doesn't do wireless charging.

    Didn't know that, thanks.

    It's kinda tough sell without wireless for such price, for me. Though I guess it's maybe a tough fit with their modular design ambitions, and corners have to be cut somewhere to keep their higher costs down.

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    How well do these connect to Canadian cell phone towers?

  • FP would be a good choice for Graphene.

    many rom developers stated before, that fairphones have a pisspoor security

  • Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
    It's fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn't even read the report.

    Yeah, it is sad. Turns out, Fairphone is just yet another fairwashing company. People spend lots of money and suffer through using this phone with its trash quality software because they think that they are saving the planet by doing so, and in the end they actually just indirectly donated maybe a few Euros to some random fair credit mill.

    Keep your eyes peeled and read what's beind the marketing, because even companies that look good rarely are.

    Especially for stuff like fair/eco/green, where it's really hard to objectively measure how good something is and where legal standards are ridiculously low.

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    headphone jackn't 😞

  • I posted this elsewhere but the tech specs for the Fairphone 6 say the following:

    USB-C 2.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly

    I was really looking forward to use this with a pair of display glasses, like the XREAL One Pro, but this seems like the Fairphone 6 might not support display output? That's sad. Especially since the Fairphone 5 had this in their tech specs:

    USB-C 3.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/display (also Android™ desktop mode)/Camera/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly

    But maybe it was not used enough?

    When I read that, it decided me on the phone. I was almost completely certain my FP4 replacement would be the FP6, but the USB downgrade makes it a no-go for me.

    Too bad, because I love the easy repairability.

  • A big problem they have is that they have to rely on Qualcomm for security updates, and the flagship chips simply don't get 8+ years of support. Fairphone uses Qualcomms IOT chips, which come with much longer support.

    Qualcomm will have to change that, what with the EU now mandating a minimum of 5 years of updates after the phone is no longer sold.

    So if Qualcomm expects their SoCs to be on the market for 2-4 years, like they do right now, they will have no choice but to provide updates for 7-9 years.

    I wouldn't be surprised if, given this development, Fairphone turn to the more conventional chips other OEMs use, which would likely also be a win for battery life.

  • Can anyone recommend this? Is the camera any good?

    You can also look at the MKBHD 2024 smartphone camera comparison test with the FP5. I would suggest taking the test yourself if that is still possible.

    I would guess that the camera will be comparable. (Everything below if FP5 assuming about the same performance with the FP6)

    For me, daylight pics were after all of the pixels but before anything else. I like the more neutral not supremely over-saturated over-sharpened/smoothed pictures that many phones take nowadays.

    For me, it was middle of the pack for dimly lit photos.

    For the overall ELO with everyone, FP5 was on the mid-lower end (of a comparison of all flagships + pixel A series), but perfectly usable for people who aren't doing social media as a job.

  • It's 6.3" because of the lack of top/bottom bezels. The phone itself is not much bigger than a Galaxy S7.

    You are genuinely the first person I've seen online who understands screen size != Phone size, because bezels exist and are different sized from phone to phone.

    My current 6.3" screen phone is virtually identical in size to the 4.2" one I had in 2012.

  • What about people who already have a BT headset, or people who are looking to buy their first headset and don't own one yet? You just straight up assume everyone still had a headset with wires lying around and that they somehow never break.

    Having to buy something makes it bad isn't really an argument. The very post you are making right now is made from a devide that has been manufactured at some point in time. If you start reasoning like that its better to start living in the woods with no possessions at all.

    Before BT headsets even existed, all of them were wired and none of them required lithium batteries or chips inside.

    Having to buy something makes it bad isn’t really an argument.

    It costs resources to produce. It is one of the main missions of FP to reduce this by having to not by a new device if your current one breaks. If buying a new one wasn't a problem, why are they trying to make it repairable?

    They are easily repairable and you don’t have to throw them away if the battery goes bad (just replace it).

    You get it.

    If you start reasoning like that its better to start living in the woods with no possessions at all.

    Taking my argument to the extreme naturally makes it absurd. But living in the woods isn't my point.

    If you look at FP's yearly financial statements, you can see how they are struggling. In 2021 and 2022 they were roughly at a breakeven point, turning basically no profit, in 2023 their operating loss was 37% of their net turnover.

    See previous comment:

    I’m saying it is very hypocritical and goes against their brand. If they simply came out and said: Look guys making phones sustainably cost too much, we need to sell higher margin items like dongles, BT earbuds and cases to have enough cashflow to continue manufacturing and R&D.

    Ok, fair enough. I would say.

    But trying to justify and greenwashing the whole ordeal is insulting. The tactic is straight out of Apple’s “Think different” book. Paying more for reduced functionality. Only for them to sell you more accessories for even more money.

  • What features would that include that the phone doesn't already have?
    I'm currently an iPhone user, but I'm looking to move to a more open source alternative.

    better cpu, 2 sim slots, a programmable button cause this dumbass launcher switch is a joke, at least 5000mah battery, at least a sceen mount fingerprint reader or even a working face recognition like in pixel phones.

    a 2 year old motorola phone has all of these for some reason, for only 300 bucks. i can pay 40 bucks for a battery change every 4 years, thats still a better deal to be honest.

  • That's what they're doing. That's why they remove the headphone jack in favour for a slimmer, lighter phone. Their market research showed that's more important to a bigger portion of their customers.

    I've never met someone that cared about a thinner phone, they've been too thin since 2015..

    People that want their ducking hradphine jacks? They are everywhere.

  • better cpu, 2 sim slots, a programmable button cause this dumbass launcher switch is a joke, at least 5000mah battery, at least a sceen mount fingerprint reader or even a working face recognition like in pixel phones.

    a 2 year old motorola phone has all of these for some reason, for only 300 bucks. i can pay 40 bucks for a battery change every 4 years, thats still a better deal to be honest.

    The dumbass launcher switch is programmable and the battery is close to 5000mAh?

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    It is an android, which is moving towards an ai for everything trajectory which might be a privacy nightmare, I wonder if the next step of the fairphone journey is to break from android

  • Unfortunately Graphene have said they will only use pixels (or potentially their own phone in the future) because no other phones have the Titan M2 security chip.

    It's a shame though, because I'd love to have Graphene on it.

    Yea but with the recent news (see his Mastodon) he's looking for other vendors.

  • Problem is, it is not IP68 rated, which is a dealbreaker for someone with an active lifestyle; especially since I sometimes manage to get water even into my IP68 phones. It would be good if they made a Pro model or just made the regular model more expensive since I will gladly pay for privacy and quality on a device that is on me at all times. For now I will stick to my Pixel 9 Pro.

    It's not? Uhhhhhg

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    tal@lemmy.todayT
    While details of the Pentagon's plan remain secret, the White House proposal would commit $277 million in funding to kick off a new program called "pLEO SATCOM" or "MILNET." Please do not call it "MILNET". That term's already been taken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MILNET In computer networking, MILNET (fully Military Network) was the name given to the part of the ARPANET internetwork designated for unclassified United States Department of Defense traffic.[1][2]
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    swelter_spark@reddthat.comS
    Swappa is good for tech.
  • No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites

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    Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL. This for me seems a completely different application from torrents. I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services' responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that's more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer. For this application: I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them. But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it's bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do. Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure. Then, with freely joining it, there's no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash. Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it. There's the issue of updates, yes, hence I've started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group's data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system. The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone's collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.
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    Neat. Looking forward to seeing what people build with that.
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    Arcing causes more fires, because over current caused all the fires until we tightened standards and dual-mode circuit breakers. Now fires are caused by loose connections arcing, and damaged wires arcing to flammable material. Breakers are specifically designed for a sustained current, but arcing is dangerous because it tends to cascade, light arcing damages contacts, leading to more arcing in a cycle. The real danger of arcing is that it can happen outside of view, and start fires that aren't caught till everything burns down.
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    Exactly, we don’t know how the brain would adapt to having electric impulses wired right in to it, and it could adapt in some seriously negative ways.
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    I wish the batteries were modular/interchangeable. You could just pull into a station, remove the spent battery and replace it with a full one, the spent one can then just get recharged and stored at the station for the next user to change out. You could even bring some extra ones in the trunk for a long trip!