Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
As someone who knows a good portion of the Fairphone staff in person, and knows they have a great atmosphere and are mostly great people: Fuck you @Fairphone for leaving my perfectly working FP1 dead in the water without SW updates, and removing the spare parts for the FP2 from the store around the time my FP2 needed them (USB charging port, battery), and for making every new fairphone larger, not offering a SINGLE phone in a proper pocket size (like the FP1).
For users who can live with the tablet-size of modern smartphones: Yes, repairability and longterm support for more recent phones appears not too bad, certainly better than most competitors, but still - if you are someone like me, who treats a phone well, you can not expect to be able to find spare parts by the time wear & tear from normal use will make it necessary.
If you can’t buy parts a decade after something is purchased, the repairability is a gimmick, a sales trick.
I’m not making a joke, that’s the truth of it, imo.
That’s how old the fairphone is.
My lgg3 is a year younger, and it’s a pain in the ass to find a real battery, but LG didn’t sell the thing with the idea of users being able to repair and upgrade. You expect an LG phone to have poor parts availability after a decade.
Like you said, a phone under normal use should last a decade plus. Barring failure of the main board, which is kinda where replacing that part means it’s a new phone rather than a repaired phone, if you’re still left with a device that you can’t get parts for, it’s landfill waste. Kinda puts a damper on sustainability as a factor.
Fairphone is a gimmick, and it always has been. A good gimmick to be sure, but a gimmick.
Sadly yes, I like the company philosophy, and I understand that - with regards to device size - due to them being small, they can only run 1 product line, no parallel small phone. But what I do not understand then is how they feel they have to release a new model every 2 years, which also drives switching the production lines for older model spare parts. That’s not sustainability in my eyes. I was severely disappointed after Fairphone advocated for repairability with “the most sustainable smartphone is your old one, if you continue using it”, and still having my Fairphone 1(!) in tip top condition (the only part that broke was the power button, which I repaired myself with an iFixit tool & a soldering iron) but no longer being able to use it because SW support is discontinued. I was even more disappointed when my FP2 finally started having problems charging because the USB port was becoming wobbly / loose, and not being able to purchase a new bottom module because “sorry, we’re on FP4 now, only spare parts we still ship are FP3 and higher”.
So now I am on shiftphone 6mq - which is not necessarily smaller, but might be usable with free OS + docking station sooner than a FP ever will.
As you say - a good gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless.
No Lineage support for Fairphones?
Sorry, I meant with a Linux-like OS usable as a (albeit low performance) desktop computer
I always think about auto repair when repairability comes up. I could still get parts for my 30yo jeep. Hell people make parts for collector vehicles, even 90 year old Model A cars.
Now, you might say modern cars are less repairable but I can also get software to diagnose and configure my 5yo Toyota 4Runner. And if I upgrade some parts it doesn’t void the warranty because of consumer friendly laws.
Tech would be very different if it followed these patterns.
is a smartphone not a gimmick to begin with.
Ehhhh, depends on how much you stretch the meaning, but I can see where you’re coming from for sure
It’s my primary computer these days, so it’s definitely a useful tool and not a gimmick for me…I do still own a laptop, but I only use it for the very few things I do that require a KB/M combo. I’d say >95% of everything that requires a computer/digital access I do with my phone.
That’s interesting. Can parts be found on other resellers or sites or is Fair phone the only suppliers for these parts?
This kinda defeats the purpose of buying one.
From other people you would only get used parts. To be fair, the Fairphone community is quite good and supportive, and there are people there that collect broken phones from users, salvage them for parts & repair phones for users. But if you would like to procure original, new parts, you should not count on the FP company to provide any beyond the support duration that they promise in writing (not sure what that is right now).
Why would anyone ever expect any company to provide more support than they provide in writing? They are still trying to make a profit and not supporting a more than 10 year old device is perfectly reasonable. They only shipped 60,000 of the thing and it’s got a GB of RAM. The second model, the 2 still has parts available ~9 years on. I’m really not seeing the issue here.
I have a feeling you did not read my comments. The second model does NOT have parts available, that’s just plain wrong. They’ve been out of stock for more than 3 years.
And as for the why, that’s because not everyone is a capitalist piece of shit, and that’s exactly the image that Fairphone is aiming for, and therefore when they advertise for sustainability, not supporting old devices is a dumb move.
Companies and people who put profit first are a cancer to this world.
If I pay about a 100% premium for the service, over a comparable phone, I expect service.
My understanding is that they alone can’t give driver updates, which is why they choose a chip for FP5 which will get supported longer. (That doesn’t explain regular software not getting updates)
I assume you looked elsewhere for Fairphone 1 parts?
You mean FP2 parts? I could have gotten them only from the Fairphone community. But I spent some time waiting for an opportunity where we would have met anyways, and I found no battery replacement, because tjat was the first component in most FP2s to fail (apart from a Display problem which was early on though and fixed under warranty)
Well you convinced me to avoid them. I use my phone’s for about a decade each.
But tgats stupid, since no manufacturer has parts available for that long. And fairphone released an update for the FP2 after 8 years of being available. Thats crazy! I think it got out around the same time as the Samsung S3. Try finding a genuine battery for that thing.
And also the FP1 and FP2 were sold in really low quantities. The FP3 was the first proper product, which therefor has much better support and will have parts available for much longer
That’s a fair perspective, but that is also not what I consider “sustainable” as they themselves claim to be. I fail to see how that is stupid, stupid is calling ones company sustainable, when it’s not ten years down the line.
Trust already broken.
Well, android itself is only 15 years old. To put that into perspective.
But yes, I would also be hella mad if they stopped supporting the FP4 or FP5 after “only” 8 or 10 years.
Not proud of that but it is an honest report of my user experience, sadly.
Same here, they lost me after fp1 which didn’t receive security updates anymore. FP2 had this weird rubber band that got loose quickly with everyone I know who had one. Stopped following after that.
Ultimately the problem is Google. The minimum system requirements for Android keep going up with every release and Google stops providing updates to older releases at some point (typically 5 years after that version was initially released). That effectively puts an upper bound on the lifespan of any phone as at some point the phones CPU and memory aren’t good enough to run the latest Android version at acceptable speeds. The lower end a phone was at original manufacturing the faster this all happens as well.
Apple is just as bad (far worse in some ways).
I’ve tried to find a solution, and the best I’ve seen is Linux phone, but that comes with some major downsides that are going to be deal breakers for most people. The two biggest ones are that battery life is abysmal unless you enable hibernation, but doing so, at least a year or so ago when I looked into it, disables your ability to receive calls while the phone is in hibernation. And secondly that NFC essentially doesn’t work, or at least not for anything you care about like being able to make payments.
I tried a Pinephone with postmarketOS and I concur with the battery life - I could never use the pinephone practically, because in standby laying in the shelf, the battery is dead in about 30 hours.
I so wished there was a Linux distribution with proper phone support & tuned to sustain the battery power, but usable with a docking station.
My dream is to no longer have to carry a laptop anywhere, just my phone, and a keyboard (if needed) and mouse, and a USB-C hub with HDMI cable, mouse & keyboard USB ports, then plug in that phone to a hotel TV or a monitor at a business partner’s place and work directly on the phone.
Laptop stays reserved for stuff that requires more computing power than LibreOffice.
Absolutely, Pinephone is an awesome project for tinkering, but it’s not a practical alternative to just buying a cheap phone.
A pity since I love the convergence package + phone, but battery is dead before I have used the phone…
Well, with fp1 specifically Google was not the main culprit. The phone used a chip (I think by mediatek?) and the producer didn’t publish the drivers. The Fairphone team promised to reverse engineer that for a while and at some point just said they won’t do it after all. That was the reason you couldn’t install other images on it, not cpu speed
The FP2 rubber casing was discontinued for that reason, but the cheap plastic shells also broke quickly (well - from falls, mostly :D so they did accomplish what they are there for: protect the phone itself from breaking). I think beyond the initial rubber shell (which also disconnected from the harder plastic shell for me) I went through 3-4 hard shells, all of which I got for free from FP though on community meetings @ the FP HQ.
Yeah, but I’m not convinced by their approach anymore as a sustainable solution. Luckily the phone feature race has mostly come to a halt, so there is a chance now for free OS options to come up (which is what we’re seeing at the moment).
The part about tracking where the material comes from us good in principle, but mostly as a proof of concept so regulators can increase pressure on big manufacturers (if Fairphone can do it, apple/Samsung should also be able to). But regulators don’t regulate, unfortunately
Regulators gonna
regulatetake bribes, I guess
I’d prefer a smaller phone too but my main problem is fairphone ditched the headphones jack.
Then sold Bluetooth earbuds.
They don’t care about electronic waste, they want their customers to throw away wired headphones and buy earbuds with batteries and wireless.
Oh did they? That is insanely dumb… :(
This is why I’ve been holding off on getting one myself. I know murena sells the phone in the US, but last I checked they didn’t sell parts, so there’s no point in a repairable phone if I can’t get parts.
Nokia has decent phones dirt cheap that you can repair yourself, and you can buy spare parts cheap too, and it runs completely vanilla Android, with good multi year upgrade policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh-7sMEDxyw
My wife has her eye on a Nokia G42, and it has both Micro SD slot and minijack. So you can use a 1TB MicroSD and laugh all the way to the bank at those who bought an S24 Ultra with 128GB 😂 🤪 😆 😜 😋
At this point I don’t even know what vanilla android looks like lol. I kinda want to get a Nokia
Yeah. Buy Nokia.
Let’s also support European companies over Chinese ones.
Except Nokia isn’t European anymore since Microsoft ruined them and sold the brand to the Chinese company HMD Global. You’re welcome.
Not only is HMD Global not Chinese, they’re actually the same Finnish company that people think of as “Nokia”. Nokia do a lot more than just phones and they sold their mobile phone arm to Microsoft, who then spun it off as it’s own company called HMD who licensed the Nokia name.
If you want to buy from a European brand, HMD/Nokia are worth considering.
Well, shit…you’re right. I messed up. I was pretty sure HMD is Chinese. Sorry for the drama, I felt very frustrated with Nokia since the downfall of Lumia. I’ll consider it, but looking forward to get the shiftphone 8 when released atm.
I thought hmd was based in Finland?
Yeah that guy is full of shit, their HQ is in Espoo, I’ve been there.
You are wrong. HMD is a Finnish company, not Chinese. Apparently it is largely made up of former Nokia employees.
If you’re going to be a smart-arse and say things like “you’re welcome”, maybe you should check the facts first.
they started manufacturing a specific model in the EU, though much more expensive.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kh-7sMEDxyw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
S24U comes with 256GB, not 128
Yes you are right, I just remembered it was small for the price, especially considering it does NOT have micro-SD.
Sadly, Nokia doesn’t support custom ROMs. But apart from that, they’re great.
Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all
They have literally an explanation for this on their website. You might disagree, but saying “it makes no sense”…makes no sense.
Also, they discontinued the earbuds and still no jack on FP5, so the idea that “they wanted to sell their own buds” doesn’t seem to be likely.
It makes no sense to me, their whole deal is sustainability, by removing the headphone jack it forces me to buy Bluetooth headphones that all have batteries in them and are presumably not up to Fairphone standards of sustainability.
And saying we’re just following market trends sounds like a shitty explanation to me. I have the 3, I’ll use it for as long as it works but after that no Fairphone for me.
Even after switching to a wireless headset (because the previous ones all broke at the wire), I would rather not use a device with no headphone jack. My headset has a very long battery life and can apparently have its battery changed fairly easily (big enough to be held together by screws). But neither of this can be said about earbuds, so my earbuds are staying wired.
Our starting point for design is longevity, which means making our devices more repairable, a very different approach to the electronics industry standard. To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack. In the end, it comes down to how we make a product that lasts for at least five years. We needed to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, and the headphone jack is subject to dust and water ingress over time.
Again, you might disagree, you might know better, I don’t know. But this is their motivation when it comes to longevity and hence sustainability. To me, it seems a reasonable idea: if the jack helps reducing the consumption of batteries in headphones but decreases the lifespan of the phones, it seems a bad tradeoff.
USB-C earbuds exist. No one is “forcing” you to do anything.
Which is still having to buy a second set of earbuds/headphones when there’s no need for it. Or buy a separate dongle (a major pain in the ass over time).
This is not “sustainability” friendly design.
Headphone jacks also exist, so I won’t be buying this phone.
Having tried to use USB-C earbuds… the experience is lacking. Once they are plugged in there is a 2-5s lag for when the headphones start working. 30% of the time they don’t work, having to unplug and plug them in to try again. Some apps won’t use them at all if the headphones are not plugged in before you start a call (google voice).
Even if you got them working, they stick out of the bottom of the phone, so propping up the phone on a desk for a video call is now super awkward.
It’s a poor echo of the experience of physically wired RTTP headphones.
Never had those problems. Worked for me better than the AUX port actually, since no metal spring got damaged over time like in most of my previous phones.
The dongle works just like AUX earphones worked
- can’t charge the phone when the USB port is in use
- can’t use the aux input of any external devices
- can’t use the headphones with anything else
- shitty experience as someone else here mentioned
- …
I like my Pixel 7 Pro but its also my first phone without a headphone jack and I hate it. Bluetooth is such a shitty standard and the USB dongles suck ass too. Why the fuck did they have to get rid of something so simple and practical…
I’m surprised they discontinued their buds. Thank you for pointing that out.
They’re still selling a 250 Euro Bluetooth headset with the phone as a option
It makes perfect sense. They wanted to sell their own branded ear buds.
i carry an emergemcy audio adpater ony keychain now, thanks fairphone.
also, two of the 4 audio adapters i have are starting to break down, forcing me to buy new ones. real sustainable you guys
and yes, the one fairphone sells is one of the broken ones.
punish them by not buying their phone
I see so many be “angry” at them and yet they still buy the phone
I’m not buying it, I have a Fairphone 3 and I’ll use it for as long as it works
I have the 4 and haven’t missed it once 🤷
That seems to be most people, but for me it’s a deal breaker.
Good for you.
Maybe the best part of the FP5 that is talked about little is that the main SoC is not a consumer grade Qualcomm chip, but an industrial grade one that will get driver and firmware upgrades for a much longer time than the consumer ones.
In addition it is fairly similar to other slightly older Qualcomm chips that already have main-line Linux kernel support, so the prospects of running Mobian or PostmarketOS on it are quite good.
- extremely slow updates
- incomplete updates as component lifespan is shorter than advertized
Yeah, its about what comes in the Future
Google sure is creating a lot of Pixel-fanboys by instilling this myth that if you dont get daddy google’s precious over-the-air updates delivered to your phone in 30 seconds after their release your phone might be at great risk®™ (exactly like if you dont let google play store scan the apps on your device to look for malicious software, like F-Droid, a common known attack vector).
Because surely Fairphone users are all government officials with nuclear codes and Kim Jong-un’s nudes saved in their notes and teams of indian hackers are 24/7 waiting for a security update to release, so they can unpack the zero-day-vulnerabilities before fairphone gets their release-cycle
Can you please elaborate further on this “component lifespan” thing? Because I think they were quite clear on the processor life cycle.
Not all components included will get security updates for as long as their OS will.
Agree that instant updates are not essential for many people, but you dont need 0days to abuse publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
What components are you talking about? Can you provide some sort of source or reference or something? Are you maybe talking about the data modem?
Yes a lot of parts. The Kernel is made for that specific SOC and may not get updated.
Then you have various parts like the modem are made by Samsung, Broadcomm etc. and need their firmware updates.
Don’t forget the fact they manufacture it in an oppressive authoritarian regime, where the sales tax goes to fund over 1 million Uighurs being held in literal concentration camps.
Imagine if 80 years ago there were products labeled “Ethically Made in Nazi Germany”, and the marketing team said it’s important to help the individual small businesses there so that the good people can have a higher standard of living.
It’s mind boggling to me that people are falling for this.
They make the problem of their supply chain clear. And still, it is probably the most “fair” phone you can get, so I dont understand the critizism really.
Why arent you criticizing all the other manufacturers, that dont even try to do anything positive? Its always the small companies, that try to improve on things and then get shitted over for not going all the way. I dont understand it…
Because there are some other manufacturers, e.g. Samsung, which don’t manufacture in China (for the most part), and IMO the problem of centralizing the world’s supply chain in China is more important than what Fairphone is trying to do.
I don’t understand how manufacturing in Korea is better than China. Hell, I’d call that pretty centralized still because it still relies on the same logistical problems.
They are making an effort though. Every other manufacturer also produces in China. Fairphone at least pays the workers better and tries to make the supply chain as ethical as possible.
No the don’t. Samsung, for example, is almost all Made in Vietnam.
The Korean OEM has fully invested in Vietnam to reduce costs. I wish other OEMs ranging from Europe to India should invest in Vietnam.
If you want something manufactured in a country that isn’t commiting human rights violations then you are not going to find it (not even the US, which is also funding a genocide right now)
Less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years sounds like most video games now.
Early access phones!
I’m on my 5th year with my Oneplus 6.
I suspect I’d I do a full wipe, a new OS and a fresh battery I should be able to keep it going for a couple more.
Phones plateaued for me. It runs fast. It holds more then enough data.
Camera is a little slow. I’ve been told to stop using the default camera app. But then the double click to open won’t work.
Same, running a xiaomi mi 6 since early 2018 with LineageOS and it’s still perfect for me. Sure, new phones have better cameras and screen but the difference is not that noticeable. I’m using a google camera app so that improves the pictures significantly so that compensates for my needs
This is exactly what I did on my OP7 (only 4 years old). A new battery, a new USB port and a new back (thank you OnePlus for the back in glass).
I installed another ROM… And the only drawback on that “brand new” phone is that the camera is slow and not as good than the stock one ( even with Gcam or others derivative).
Yep, Oneplus 5 with 6 years in use here.
Battery time is a little shorter but still enough for a whole day of intensive use.
Phone cameras have gotten better in the last years for sure but if I really want to make good pictures I use a DSLR.
I’m going on 4ish years with a OnePlus 9, and the battery is starting to shit out so bad
I have had my fairphone 5 since October, and I am
contemptcontent with it, ive noticed a few software bugs and made the customer support team aware about them and while I’ll admit their responses are rather slow at times, ive never had a problem with attitude or unhelpfulness so far from them.I will do what I can to genuinely keep this phone going until the security updates stop, being able to buy and replace the battery for a respectable 20 quid is incredible.
I’m also very excitied to see what 2027 brings as that is the year manufacturers are required, if they want to sell in the EU, to make their phones extremely repairable
i think you mean content, little bit different meaning than contempt ;)
Damn words sounding the same
I’m also very excitied to see what 2027 brings as that is the year manufacturers are required, if they want to sell in the EU, to make their phones extremely repairable.
Now that is something I did not know. Now I’m also very excited.
I expect these companies will still be on top even if they made phones repairable. Like for example, you can only buy parts from official store or else phone will not work
Wow a site that doesn’t fill up 90% of your phone’s viewport with ads? Color me impressed
why wouldn’t you use AdBlock?
Yeah, one of the very few sites not hit hard by enshittification
That’s the first positive thing I’ve seen someone say about The Verge.
Thanks to the verge I now know to always carry a pocket knife to build computers with.
So “Occasionally sluggish performance” now at launch? Surely it won’t be much better 5 years from now
The phone is great and things can be replaced easily. My only issue with the phone is it’s price. It’s quite high compared to phones with similar specs.
It’s because they try to ethically source as much of the phone as possible, and go out of their way to pay fair wages and ensure no forced labour is used in the supply chain.
Unfortunately that adds significant cost.
Unfortunately that adds significant cost.
That’s not unfortunate, that’s logical. Unfortunately, other companies are allowed to exploit humans and the environment for more profit despite lower prices.
It’s amazing when you realize that modern civilization as we know it depends on numerous layers of slavery, child labor, and general worker exploitation.
Also don’t forget the “externalized” costs of massive and irreversible environmental damage!
Yeah I feel all it takes is 5% of mankind to have evil / selfish intentions, to corrupt the system
Well yeah, I mean unfortunate as in it’s unfortunate it makes it a harder buy. I’m not pissed off that it’s more ethically produced.
They only harvest from sustainable phone forests. 👍
Yea that’s what happens if the company at least tries to make it repairable and not made by exploited people.
No offence but I don’t think this phone will be any good in a few years because of the CPU choice.
If it’s already sluggish now, what will it be like in 5 years? Unusable.
I’m writing this comment on a Fairphone 5 right now and it doesn’t feel sluggish at all.
It doesn’t seem to me like the increased performance of phones has had much effect on the actual experience for a while if gaming or content creation is not done on the phone. As a daily driver I think this phone will last me a while.
I mostly can’t get over paying more for worse specs. It doesn’t have to feel bad now but with 8 years of support it could very easily not feel good in the future. It’s a $760 phone that benchmarks close to the Samsung A54 a $400 phone.
The selling point is the ethical value of the phone but it’ll never top how much waste buying a used phone saves.
Other phones can be much cheaper because they don’t care about slavery or child labor in their production line and don’t support their phones that long
But iPhones get long support, pixels now get 7, and S24 get 7.
Fairphone themselves even admits they can’t fix everything in production so a phone that was about to be waste is more fair.
If they built their phones in Germany or something I could accept the price but they’re made in China where labor standards aren’t exactly great.
Yes they are obviously not perfect but they are at least trying to change something, while the massive cooperations just dont acknowledge that problem at all.
And the updates thing: Apple controls the ecosystem and are a huge company. They dont have to worry about manufactures for a processor or other parts not supporting it longer and stop giving it driver updates. Same with Samsung and especially Google. They are huge companies that can basically do what they want. They will be able to get a hold of drivers and firmware because they are a huge customer to the manufactures. And they only just started promising those long updates. Meanwhile Fairphone has been trying for years to support their devices that long and had to struggle because they are not a massive cooperation that can influence manufactures like that to the point they now dont use normal consumer grade chips but ones with extended support.
Do they pay you to “yeah but” for them or are you just a simp?
Eh nope. Just stating facts that’s all
Backmarket FTW
I’m typing this from a smartphone with Snapdragon 765g, a basically older version of the 778g. The 778g is better in every way compared to the many years older 765g and my phone does not feel sluggish in any way for my use cases: messaging, phone calls, video calls, media consumption, but no gaming. For me the 778g would be the perfect chip (like the 765g was): a perfect compromise between battery life, capabilities and price.
It’s not about the processor, it’s about the official software support. Some people don’t want to have to flash a custom ROM to get decent performance, some people want good performance out of the box from the official software
I have a phone with 732G, it’s already super smooth on my phone with the official OS and it still has perfect software support. A newer snapdragon wouldn’t have much issues.
Offtopic:
(MediaTek on the other hand is actual and absolute garbage. Don't look at their (probably cheated) benchmarks, they provide absolutely no proper support for their chips. There is a reason why anybody who wants to do custom ROMs or android development tries to get an snapdragon.)How is the CPU choice and official software support related? Genuine question, I don’t follow smartphone tech news, I just look up stuff whenever I or someone in my family needs a new phone.
The comment I was replying to said that this Fairphone was going to be sluggish because of the CPU choice, with which I disagreed because I’m basically using an older CPU from that CPU family without issues, so I know that it doesn’t have to be sluggish. Not in a Fairphone though, but in a Motorola edge, so the software will indeed be different.
sometimes a phone with a good CPU performs poorly because of poorly optimized software
Often people on the internet will respond to that “well just find a custom ROM and a custom kernel, flash that and it’ll be butter smooth!”
So I was assuming that you were implying that “only the CPU spec matters because you can always flash any software” and to that I respond that maybe some people don’t want to flash aftermarket software
No, I wasn’t, my phone is still completely stock. I use a custom launcher which could slow it down, but no issues there either. The processor just works smoothly in all my use cases and I blame all my connection issues on my network provider (they suck and I have no way of knowing of it’s 100% of the time their fault, or only 90%, so I just blame them for every connection issue).
for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone
laughs in Fairphone 3
Why are you posting an article from september 2023?
Its mediocre camera is a deal breaker for me. Camera is the most important phone feature to me
For me the price is the biggest limiting factor, that and it doesn’t work around here anyway. it has almost Flagship level price for just a little bit better specs than your everyday $300 phone that you can buy off the shelf.
