Fairphone

Fairphone Product Manager, Javier Manrique, puts it perfectly, “It’s all about balance. Do we want a bigger battery or smaller display? How do we offer the best cameras possible without breaking the bank for the end-user? There are a variety of factors to consider, and some hard decisions to make.” The mini-jack on the Fairphone 3 is the perfect example. Like we mentioned earlier, user feedback showed us that bulkiness was a bigger concern for the majority of our users, so we had to remove the headphone jack to make the Fairphone 4 thinner.

Wut.. Some people avoid buying phones without audio jack, no audio jack is one of their biggest misses, probably the first thing people complain about fairphone and they say they removed to make the phone slimmer? Was there even ever a poll? Also didnt they use to say in the past that they removed it cuz it was waste or whatever?

And apart from all these, is making a phone slimmer really a stepcloser to sustainability than adding ~0.3cm³ for an audio jack that wont require buying dongles that stop working, wont require wearing out the usb port, wont require buying wireless earphones (how handy that they also sell wireless earphones, very expensive too) and will make the phone compatible with so much already existing hardware? (I personally have both wireless and wired and I use them both (the wired with a dongle on my phone) for different occasions (when I need mobility I use wireless, when I want good audio quality I used wired and both wired and wireless cost around 20€ and both seem to last for years.)

Having said that, we’re still not making enough hard decisions, according to Fairphone co-founder, Miquel Ballester. “The Fairphone 5 is a good example of where we tried to do much, without excelling in one area. Learning from that, we’re making more focused choices for our future designs.”

Hmmm, are they preparing us for cutting more features on the upcoming model?