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.

headphone jackn't

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It's not? Uhhhhhg

Yeah but the entire philosophy of Framework would be one phone construction standard and then you swap out the radio chip. Granted, there's never been a hard phone standard, and the parts have never been designed for swapping. They would be the ones designing and commissioning these standards. Anyway, so I'm gonna be waiting very patiently.

Worth noting buying a second hand phone is still better in every aspect and sadly 2nd hand Samsung from 3 years ago is still better and cheaper. Though Fairphone is getting closer with each release!

They cooperate with Murena, so /e/OS is officially supported and you can buy new devices with /e/OS installed. I am running /e/OS on my Fairphone 5 and it works great.

They also seem to have given developer devices to the PostmarketOS folks, so that they hit the ground running with a working FP6 port already. I'm not sure exactly what is going on behind the scenes between Fairphone and PostmarketOS here - maybe @z3ntu@fosstodon.org can fill us in.

I installed it myself on my FP5 (bought with Android in a shop) using the online installer, which was pretty easy and obviously free of charge.

There are those waterproof bag things. I wouldn't trust the IP rating on a phone.

I would not recommend Murena for U.S. customers. I attempted buying a FP4 from them, and they put $6000 in charges to my credit card. Their message-only customer service was terrible and tried to blame me. Had to get my bank involved.

Fairphone has been a really disappointing experiment in so-called sustainable tech over the years. They keep making new phones instead of continuing to support the old ones, which might be greenwashing. (Whereas if you got a legacy Framework 13, it's still user-repairable and upgradable.) If they wanted to make a non-upgradable device, maybe it would have been wise to make it high-end to futureproof to work until 4G gets phased out. Fairphone still is not making their products available in the U.S., and Murena is a borderline scam company and I am genuinely shocked Fairphone works with them.

And I've heard their logic with the headphone jack, but I do think AUX is the lesser of two evils as removing it will just lead to more e-waste with broken bluetooth headphones that rarely last as long as good wired ones. Fairphone's own bluetooth accessories have gotten negative reviews for their lower build quality, so Fairbuds are likely not the solution to the headphone jack problem.

For the simple fact that non-Europeans can buy them directly off the website, I would sooner recommend feature phones from Sunbeam as it also has user-replaceable batteries and you can send it in for repairs. Or just any phone used.