Yesterday my old Fairphone 3 decided to go for a dive on the kitchen sink and I apparently didn’t give it enough time to dry it out. The display now won’t turn on. I went to their website to look for a replacement but they seem to be “out of stock”. So much for repairability…
I’m a bit disappointed with the Fairphone overall (that would be for a separate discussion), and I’m looking for other alternatives.
I don’t really need a powerful device, but I’d really like to have a headphone jack, a SD slot and above all the ability to install alternative ROMs. I was using /e/OS (aka MurenaOS) but I’d be fine with anything that lets me use F-Droid and micro-g instead of Google Play Services.
I know that there are “comparison websites” out there that can filter devices by features and/or price, and I know that Murena and LineageOS sites provide a list of the devices they support, but I haven’t found any suite that can include both. Does such a site exist?
Ifixit has FP3 displays in stock in my region.
As for a replacement… I don’t think there’s much devices that will fit the bill unfortunately. Closest thing is going to be a Pixel device IMO
I personally use a FP3 too, and can’t see a device that I can upgrade to whenever my FP3 kicks the bucket. I came from a Galaxy S5 and this was the only device available that offered all the same features, except the heart rate sensor, OLED display and ANT+ support (for connecting to Garmin fitness sensors Etc).
Fairphone does make some really odd decisions, like none of their new devices having a headphone jack despite there being a DAC output still available on the mainboard. The main saving grace is that they know how to make a device you can actually own, and historically they were proactive in getting their OEM to implement user requested features into the OS.
Nah, I feel cheated by Fairphone. With the whole FP3 and FP3+, they were leading with the idea that they have settled on the form factor, and then just evolve the separate mainboard/camera/display modules independently. With the FP4, they scraped all that and just chased whatever was trendy at the time and cranked the “but the environment” marketing.
I paid the Fairphone premium knowing that the specs were crap, but that at least in the future I wouldn’t need to upgrade by buying a whole phone. Promising to have software upgrades for 8 years is nice, but it’s worthless if you can not upgrade any of the hardware in the meantime.
For now I will just go buy a “budget premium” Android and pray that the people from frame.work decide to extend into phones as well in the next 2-3 years.
Fair enough. From my perspective it was ambitious thinking anyway: I was actually curious as to how Fairphone got things like the replaceable camera to work (had a peek in their git, it kind of works: they init the old driver and try to turn on the camera, if it returns an error then they load the new driver). The truth is though, a 100% truly modular phone, in the same way a PC is modular, cannot happen without some serious standardization.
Unlike webcams that use USB internally, and laptop displays that use standardized connectors and protocols (like eDP), mobile phones are almost entirely proprietary devices with a finite hardware-limited range of peripherals they can support at a low level.
Qualcomm in particular doesn’t care about backwards compatibility when it comes to their SoCs, meaning the MIPI interface for the phone display on one SoC may be moved to completely different pins on another Qualcomm SoC, or may use a completely different number of pins. The same applies to the camera interface, although the main concern there will be the SoC, as it ultimately determines what resolutions/framerates etc you can achieve within the limits of the camera module.
Those are both solvable problems though. The real issue in my eyes is the lack of a proper BIOS to build a device tree and the other stuff that an OS build would need to be device-agnostic, like closed-source blobs for fingerprint scanners, display brightness control etc. These essentially limit mobile ARM devices to OSes made specifically for that hardware, preventing drop-in upgrades for cameras and the like from being a thing - unless you take Fairphone’s approach and handle it in user space
I agree. To me most of the FP4 marketing material felt a bit like greenwashing, and the excuse for the headphone jack removal was pretty poor considering they also released completely unrepairable earbuds shortly after. The materials used may be fairer, but the pros end there as far as the buds are is concerned.
The FP5 marketing material is not as bad in that regard I think, and the Fairbuds XL should have been what they released originally compared to the unrepairable buds cash grab, even if they offered it discounted (IIRC) with the FP4.
True. I feel unless the software updates are optimized to take advantage of the phone’s hardware as it ages, the performance will fall off a cliff, especially as consumables like the EMMC storage uses up its write cycles, and takes longer to identify suitable areas of its NAND to use for operations.
A Framework phone would also be something I’m interested in, especially if it follows the likes of Project Ara’s design