Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves - This sustainable smartphone aims to reduce global electronic waste
Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves - This sustainable smartphone aims to reduce global electronic waste
In a bid to reduce global electronic waste, Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves. What makes its technology so sustainable?
Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves - This sustainable smartphone aims to reduce global electronic waste::In a bid to reduce global electronic waste, Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves. What makes its technology so sustainable?
![[BBC] - What does a sustainable smartphone look like?](https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/8d4e8d0c-eaad-4fec-8f9a-f5aaadef908b.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
When I couldn't repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
you got me
almost like a toyota, outdated and often too expensive for what it can do but will last forever.
Can confirm, nothing broke yet :(
I was so ready to go hard on this comment, you got me there pal.
Ironically Nokia* now make highly repairable phones** again
* Specifically, the company that bought the Nokia Phones brand
** Only their G series
I had the same thing with the FP2. I even got a cheap spare one from ebay to use for spares. Both are still fine. One is now an alarm clock and the other one is a gps for my bike
Fairphone existed for years now, and the title makes it seem like as if they made a new phone just now that is repairable.
Yeah, the Fairphone 2 is 7 years old and you can still buy all the important replacement parts directly from their store.
Does it still get OS updates?
Yeah, they're touting this as if it isn't old news. Yes, the phones are cool and yes, America can't have them. What else.
the main complaint from me is still the headphone jack. they faced insane backlash when they released the FP4. i thought this company cares about the user as well as the environment. but it seems they didn't realize that people want actual features (like wireless charging, the headphone jack, or a usable battery size).
don't get me wrong, i own a Fairphone 4 and love using it. but making these mistakes 2 times in a row now is just pathetic.
Not including wireless charging IS caring about the environment. Wireless charging is extremely wasteful and inefficient.
Then don't use it. people who want to switch expect basic features like this for double the price.
"we want to reduce e-waste by forcing everyone to throw out their wired headphones and buy a new set of wireless ones every couple of years when the battery goes dead"
The hypocrisy enrages me here
I've been using the same pair of Sony XB50AP wired headphones for over 7 years now. It works fine (although not great) even after going through couple washing machine cycles. Meanwhile my wireless WH1000XM3 broke after 2 years of use.
Also I own an Android with no headphone jack, so I have to use a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle. And I can feel it's slowly destroying the type C port's connectors on my phone everytime I plug the dongle in, making the headphone connection sometimes not even recognizeable on my phone.
There are wireless earbuds with repairable batteries. Just not Fairbuds, which have soldered batteries (LOL!)
The problem is there is no competition here. I’d love to see several repairable smartphones with slightly different features that create some competition. For example something with a max 5.5” screen and only a single camera.
Yes, absolutely. fairphone themselves say they want to create competition by making the fairphones. sadly, no one has really fully committed to this.
I can't speak to your other requirements but the Nokia brand has a couple of repairable phones as a result of an ifixit partnership.
As Linux Phones they're a bit more niche but the Librem 5 and the Pine Phone/Pro are very repairability focussed
Actually, there is at least one other company specializing in sustainable / repairable electronics - besides Fairphone - I'm aware of.
Check out Shiftphone: Their new Shiftphone 8 (still under development / construction) will be a pretty solid deal with a reasonable price-performance ratio - already pre ordered mine and very excited for final delivery in March.
... Their previous models as well as spare parts, etc. are also still available through their shop.
Usable battery size? The FP5 has a 4200mah battery which is about 500mah less than the s23 plus which is pretty reasonable and I've found it very usable for day to day use. Wireless charing is a pointless gimmick personally and I don't see the utility of it. Lack of a headphone jack is a pain though.
Wireless charging is a good alternative to have when your usb-c port breaks.
Of course, with Fairphone is is less of an issue since replacing those is like 15€.
My guess for the real reason is that they buy off-the-shelf components from suppliers and don't have enough money to design and order a custom motherboard with a headphone jack.
they designed the whole thing themselves. that's why the schematics are publicly available. they definetely made a choice to fuck over users.
Jep their decision that I shouldn't waste energy is the reason i don't want one(wireless charging)
plus it's easy as heck to add during development, i simply don't get why they didn't include it.
I do sometimes feel like what we really want is something a little bit more like how Framework are doing things. Yes it's easily repairable, but it's also easily upgradable.
Upgradability isn't really a design consideration for fairphone. So everyone is stuck with the kind of mediocre camera that they decided to put on it. It would be nice if the option was there to have something a bit better.
Actually, they do.
The Fairphone 3 was upgradable to the Fairphone 3+ by buying spare parts like the camera and installing them yourself.
The thing is that phones don't really need upgrades.
The main upgrade they need is the processor because the companies making those are not supporting newer Android-Versions and at some point that becomes a security-issue.
Problem is that replacing the processor to a newer generation usually means the whole mainboard is obsolete, too and then is very quickly doesn't become easy to upgrade anymore
just switching between different types of cameras, screens etc. wouldn't be as big of a problem but that's also not part of the main-problem either
It's a great thing, and I hope the industry (with motivation by EU) will follow a trend towards repairability and sustainability. However I think the most sustainable way is buying used devices.
Unfortunately you need something with long firmware and software support. Qualcomm is your enemy, they stop updating the firmware of their chips after about two years and that's why android phones often stop getting updates less than 2 years after you buy them.
they're selling refurbished FP4s now but yeah, buy used phones, or at least B-stock.
Used devices still break and end in landfills, though, used might be better than new for carbon output today, but repairable is gonna win out in that regard long term
even better, a used repairable phone.
Hopefully in the future repairable and used can go hand in hand! Those are not mutually exclusive attributes.
Own a 4 had to replace the screen, and it was refreshingly easy with the modular system. My only issue is parts availability at times.
I've replaced a few screens that were glued in place (Samsung being one), just had to warm them with a hair dryer and used a playing card to cut through the adhesive. Easy-peasy.
Fairphone 5 Please come to the US ☹️
You're not allowed nice things until you get rid of the guns, remember?
If you have friends in the EU, maybe you could pay them what it would cost in terms of buying and shipping the phone over here. Or, if you can find one, maybe there's someone online who does imports that might be willing to help import one.
But yeah, I really hope they expand their business here even though they'll be absolutely 100% legally bullied out of business and forced to leave the US market because cApItAlIsM.
My wife and I got new phones earlier this year, because her battery wasn't holding a charge anymore. The FP5 looked awesome and had everything we wanted, but they won't release it in the US. So we were stuck with the usual suspects. I understand why FP can't bring all of their stuff here, but it still sucks.
I'm the US... Literally a new phone every one or two years.
If you're thrifty like me, it's every four years. And watch as that phone suffers from bad battery life, then incredible slowdown, then apps not updating/working, or worst... your phone provider refuses to support your device any longer. You Feel forced to upgrade your perfectly workable mobile device.
We pay a subscription fee for both the service AND the hardware.
My current phone is 5 years old. Could use a battery (which I can buy for $10). It runs faster than any phone in my circle (running a fork of Lineage, currently Android 13, and it will get the update to 14 any day now).
No reason phones can't last a long time.
Oh, and I paid $100 for this phone, so I have 3 them, one for testing and one as a hot spare, and still spent less than buying new.
I feel like I still want a phone that is repairable but also upgradeable. Slowly being able to swap in a better screen, better camera, and a new mainboard when it's time to upgrade.
The Google Ara was supposed to be exactly this. I think it has since been abandoned. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara#:~:text=Google%20planned%20to%20launch%20a,planned%20consumer%20launch%20in%202017.
Yes I'm very disappointed the the FP4 looks almost the same as the FP4 but isn't backwards compatible in the slightest... I was looking forward to upgrade my screen.
I think the Pinephone/Pinephone Pro has this functionality.
It's still very much a developer's device, though. It isn't ready for widespread use.
is this an ad?
I see it more like a hacker news style "show HN"
I've had a fairphone 4 running /e/OS (aftermarket) for a month now and im very happy with it. It consistently surprises me and exceeds my expectations in terms of flexibility and reliability (and of course privacy).
You should be aware that there are occasionally compatibility issues with common apps -- particularly proprietary ones. The worst incident was when the NordVPN app stopped working for me a few days ago... though this may have been a problem with /e/OS or the custom launcher ive installed rather than with Fairphone. I ended up switching to Mullvad VPN and i like it a lot more.
Also I have not been able to purchase any paid apps via the App Lounge... i get a google error message stating that my device isnt registered with the Google Play Store or something like that. not sure if its just me or a widespread problem. I suspect it is an /e/OS issue that might not present itself if u are just using stock Android. If you have some absolutely must-have google play store paid apps that you can't do without, I'd avoid /e/OS for now and some research to make sure this bug doesnt exist when using Android on FP4.
At this stage i cant recommend it for mom & dad or someone without any tech savvy whatsoever... but the privacy and flexibility make these minor setbacks absolutely worth it to me.
Overall i have no regrets and I can honestly say this is one of the most satisfying purchases I've ever made.
Also I have not been able to purchase any paid apps
It's the same on my Pixel 6a with CalyxOS and the Aurora Store (anonymous access to Play Store). We simply cannot get a paid Play Store app to work without logging into Google. I can get my bank app, local transit app, firefox, bitwarden, etc from there as well as what I've settled on for driving nav, HereWeGo.
That's TomTom's free nav app and it appears to get it's traffic info from the commercial solutions TomTom provides to truckers (paid service for them). It's good enough, but I do miss Google Maps sometimes. I like it better than Apple Maps.
Most everything else is handled through FDroid and the apps are decent to great, no show stoppers. I don't use it for much that would leak privacy on the app side besides banking, browsing and navigation though. It's not for everyone.
The only way I can think of to use paid apps is to pay the developer directly and then sideload. I don't even know if any devs do that.
As long as /e/os hangs tough my next phone will probably be a FairPhone, I really dig the philosophy and repairability.
You can buy apps from the play store with your google account in a browser, then log into your google account in aurora to download them. If your google account is important to you, you should be aware of the risk that google might ban it though. I recommend using a separate account for aurora. And it's also of course less private than using aurora anonymously.
I tried /e/OS too, and had a great experience. The system has a polished feel and a lot of privacy-oriented settings by default, when compared to stock android.
I see a lot of criticism about that OS on reddit/lemmy, but never objectively stating what they mean, so I don't know what to think about it.
Lineage OS can (optionally) link to Google services, so that would be a suitable OS for users needing Google
Sadly, their software QA sucks and thus the phone is buggy as hell.
Whitch is really frustrating because otherwise it's a pretty good (if oversized and overly expensive) phone.
Indeed. I own the 3 and it's ups and downs. In the end it is still good enough plus the aspect of more fairness in the whole process.
Do report these on the FP forum when you encounter them, the staff seem pretty proactive at getting these fixed, although it takes them a while... (at least they were for the FP3 - even community requests for a very low screen brightness were honored, and now they're supporting two versions of android for the FP3 due to Google's fingerprint sensor requirement nonsense on Android 13)
Sure, done that. But the issues I have have been open for months (e.g. the really unresponsive screen since they "fixed" the ghost touch issue by reducing the screen sensitivity for all phones, even the ones not affected by ghost touches, making other phones ignore touches all the time).
Or Android 13 frequently crashing, resetting or freezing if you dare to use 5G. That's a blocker level bug that is open since Android 13 was released and support told me a week ago that they still have no clue why this happens.
And even though some of these bugs are super easy to fix (and I proposed some fixes that I got running on my phone using root, with no access to any source code) they still spend months not fixing them.
The very low screen brightness for example took from February to October to fix, even though it took me 15min and I sent my fix to support and posted it on the forums. No change happened until they updated to A13, which rewrote that part of AOSP.
And the ghost touch/screen sensitivity issue, which has a dead simple fix, is still open since launch. The issue there is that the screens have very different levels of sensitivity from the factory. So if they set one software sensitivity level, either some get ghost touches or others get an unresponsive screen. So the fix is to just add a toggle or a slider in the settings that users can use to adjust the screen sensitivity, just like e.g. Samsung has done for a long time. Instead, they just arbitrarily change that value to ruin the experience for someone else.
And yes, that proposed solution has been on the forums for years and it was also sent to support.
Own a fp4, dont have any issues. But i am running lineageOS on it :')
When are we going to get worldwide shipping Fairphone? Next year maybe?
I'm writing this on a Fairphone 5 right now, the hardware is great, the only slight issue is the USB C Port is a little looser than I would like, not enough for a problem, alas.
The main issue currently is the software, there's a few well known bugs that cause annoyances that the Fairphone forum widely know about, one of which requires you to hold the power button down and force restart the phone. I am confident that the developers and customer support are aware of these bugs and are working to fix them.
Overall I'm happy with it, £700 isn't too bad for a phone that I'm going to try to keep for the whole 8 to 10 years that have promised security patches. Sure its doesn't have flagship specs, but no day to day tasks for me require that power.
I have to say that in terms of software the team is amazing. They seem to listen to the community, and work super hard to keep up with the updates.
USB C Port is a little looser than I would like
Maybe yours is one that barely passed QC. That's one of the replaceable modules though right? Might be worth contacting CS about.
I mean I would if the cable kept becoming unplugged, its more it wiggles more than I'd like
Very interested in repair but I also want software freedom, and I've not heard anything about avoiding proprietary drivers/software.
I run /e/ OS on my FP4, super easy install. Been loving it.
And yet they straight up ignore one of the biggest cell phone markets by not selling in the US at all.
small company, my dude. they only have a few hundred employees, but they have said numerous times that they are planning to bring a full release to the US.
Technically you can buy one in the US, but spare parts (especially the battery) might pose some issues
But it's deGoogled running something called /e/OS, and it's only compatible with T-Mobile and stuff that uses their network
I'd love a fully featured one here in the states that can be brought to any carrier over here
/e/ was a fork of Lineage a couple years ago (not sure if it still is).
Their approach is to use their own cloud system instead of Google's. I think they promote it as more secure (as in they don't see your data), but I don't recall for sure.
You can run their OS without using their sync system too. You could flash something like MicroG or even authentic Google Play Services (it's available from Google as a couple packages).
Don't trust me on this, my memory is a bit suspect, but I played with /e/ a couple years ago. And they need to change that name - they said they were going to.
Well they don't ignore that market. They decided to not sell there yet. Because going to a new large market far away from all your warehouses and with a potential large demand cause a lot of headaches. Not to mention all the regulations and rules they need to abide by.
Can't wait for companies to start, every year, slowly making their phones slightly bigger and make the components unnecessarily slightly bigger to ensure you can't just use an old phone with upgraded parts. Doesn't matter if the parts don't actually contribute to the overall function, just so long as you are trapped into buying a new phone.
It won't even make a dent in the amount of damage that oil companies are doing.
This ain't going to do shit for the environment. You already could replace most shit it was just harder. It's just another toy for nerds to tinker with.
Prices for parts and the actual service being carried out are often more than half the price of a new device so even people that would want to repair end up not doing so. The Fairphone is seriously improving that equation!
have you tried to repair a regular phone? i have disassembled my fairphone down to the motherboard numerous times just for the fun of it. there are no adhesives to replace in the entire phone. you just need a screwdriver.
I have.
For the most part once the screen is removed (heat gun and playing card) everything else isn't too hard. Some phones are more difficult.
Fairphone is a neat idea, but I think it's a challenging sell because people who don't know how to fix a phone will either pay someone of buy another. And those of us willing to do it ourselves quickly learn they're not hard to repair, usually. So the niche is very small.