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Fairphone 3 gets 7 years of updates, besting every other Android OEM
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc
their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that's not feasible or desirable to the vast majority
imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things... that's a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour
For me the problem is the SoC they chose was too slow to be viable in 2018, let alone today.
"Too slow to be viable" is a bit strong. I've had a fairphone 4 for at least a year now and I've had no issues.
I want these people to try living with an ancient galaxy s5 for a couple months, browsing the web is borderline physically painful, it gets so hot that touching the screen almost burns you, and it has so little RAM that it struggles to keep two apps active at once.
Literally if i have music playing and i open the browser it usually kills the music in the background.
my current phone has the same soc and there are absolutely no issues there. will report back once i get my fairphone 4, hopefully tomorrow
if you're not gaming on your phone (and if you are, 1. why, 2. get a steamdeck), i honestly don't see how you would notice the soc. the only time i ever noticed that my phone was weak in the past five years (and my current phone is the only one that was low-mid-range, not actual low-end, save for an iphone se 3rd gen i had for half a year) was during zooming into an abnormally large upscaled r/place image. a phone's performance is not really something that should be a consideration for the average user nowadays, anything can run basic apps that should have been websites and play back video. the mid-tier 2021 soc in the fairphone 4 definitely qualifies.
if the complaint is about the fairphone 3, then absolutely fair, i do remember that that one did manage to be hella slow. i wanted one back then and it was one of the major issues.
Slide in a 3 here just cause termux x11 + box64droid is really coming along well and I want to be able to play all my games in my phone lol. Especially cause where I work has a lot of down time, but obviously not room for a full pc
Almost any modern SoC can decode 1080p60 HEVC in real-time. That part is handled in dedicated hardware; the speed of the CPU or GPU next to it does not matter.
Thank God I referred to that dedicated hardware by name eh? Did some research and the fair phone supports hvec at 8 bit, not 10.
Personally that looks a bit washed out, and the battery wouldn't hold up too well - so it'd be a pass for me
Edit: the fair phone 4 would fair (lol) a lot better though
You did not specify that you need a 10-bit capable decoder. Given that the screen is 8-bit, that would be kind of unusual to have outside of niche applications such as this one.
8 vs. 10 bit shouldn't make the image look better outside of toning down banding artefacts. There might be an indirect colour transformation taking place here.
I do some light nuisance games on my phone, but I absolutely can tell the difference between the 888 in my phone and a 865, let alone the thing in the fairphone.
Sure, I'm spoiled, but I am not willing to give up 120hz at 120fps in my apps and instant loading in the ui nor will I ever get anything but oled again.
If you're asking for a 5+ year commitment to the device, which is kind of what this repairability thing does, you either have to be at the leading edge or have an upgrade path.
Fairphone has neither, they're starting at 2 years behind but want me to pay as if they're a modern midrange.
i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it's not competitive spec-wise, but it's what they have to do to keep up their model. they're not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you're ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.
the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you'd likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.
from what i've seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they'd need over the same period of time.
I don't see myself doing anything with my s21 other than a new battery in another year.
My problem isn't necessarily the price being so high, it's that the performance is just trash for that price. The repairability for a phone in that performance class is OK. In my mind I compare it to an A6 in performance which comes with amoled screen and there's enough parts on the market to rebuild it forever. The only advantage fairphone has is that there's no glue on the back panel there's thousands of A9s already manufactured.
And the A6 costs < $100 on the used market with a new battery.
IMHO fairphone is making e-waste by making more already obsolete phones and taking advantage of people's desire to think they're saving the world by using a repairable phone when getting something of better quality/performance from the used market is actually better for the environment.