Fairphone 6 approaching? They are great, the project is amazing and I wish every brand would be like them in terms of caring about users and environment
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Still like the idea behind it and wish there was support for GrapheneOS (going even further than /e/o) as well as better camera quality but this is the price we have to pay for flexibility and sustainability I think. Like the concept here but never tried to go with one so far.
Can even get it pre-installed with /e/OS to minimise snooping by Google
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Fairphone don't sell replacement mainboards, presumably to stop people building phones from parts but they look very serviceable in other respects.
They say it's supported until 2031.
What will a 5G phone with at most 8GB RAM have to offer in 2031?
In what kind of bizarro world do we live that 8GB of RAM in a phone is not enough? Also 6G is currently expected to be available around 2030, so 5G will most likely still work in 2031.
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assuming it supports 5g calling and 5g lasts as long as 3g did it will still function for calls, MMS, SMS, and email at a minimum (assuming encryption doesn't change too much)
I don't want to pay now then £200 for a phone and i want a small one.
Then an ethically and sustainably built smart phone isn't for you, because that won't be possible at that price point. But that isn't an issue as there is a sustainable option at that price point: buying second hand.
The hardware is good and I like the idea in principle but Fairphone's support and software QA is dreadful and you need to hope you never need the former because of problems with the latter. My FP5 was bricked by an update they pushed out and after six weeks of trying to get a solution from their support (four weeks of which they didn't respond at all) I ended up claiming on insurance and buying a Pixel. According to the forums this problem is far from unique to me.
I've been running FP4 for about 2 years now. the software bug fix cycle leaves something to be desired.
for example, the first 16 months of my ownership had every single phone call screaming at me. I mean, the volume was loud enough it was quieter than the speaker phone.
the did eventually fix that bug, but not two months later there's a bug that breaks my running processes button(square at the bottom). as of right now there's no fix other than using the OEM shitty launcher. so, 5-10 times a day I have to go to settings > apps > default apps > launcher > bliss launcher > running apps > settings > launchers > my launcher > close what I just had to use > go back to what I was just doing.
I enjoy the phone, don't get me wrong. I just wish they performed better software testing on their own hardware.
I got the phone for the ethics, reparability, and privacy. I'll never go back.
I've been meaning to look into PinePhone myself.
As an owner of an old pine phone, I can confidently say avoid for now. Not remotely ready or reliable enough.
I just want something to have decent Linux support. I want to run postmarketOS, mobian, or something of that ilk on my phone, and I want all the basic phone features to work properly:
- battery - phone should sleep and wake properly so I can get a full day's use out between charging
- modem - calls, SMS, MMS, data, etc should all work consistently
- wifi/bluetooth - should be reliable and something I don't notice
- audio - speaker and mic should be sufficiently good and reliable
And so on. I don't need any special app support, I just need the phone to be able to reliably do phone things.
Here are issues I've heard about from the PinePhone (Pro):
- battery - well short of a full day, though OG PinePhone is much closer than PinePhone Pro
- calls - I think this is okay now?
- SMS/MMS - the best solution I've seen is to hook up an MMS bridge to Matrix, upload everything there, then download; that's ridiculous
- wifi/bluetooth - I think it's okay? Honestly, it's not something I've bothered to check up on
- audio - I've heard audio quality sucks, both on the mic and the speaker
That doesn't get into actual usability issues. I'm honestly pretty tolerant of a laggy interface, but I need those basic phone functions to work properly.
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I've owned the 4, for a couple of years. Was really excited to get one.
Parts have been unavailable for a long time when I needed them. The battery is pretty dead after 2 years meanwhile my pixel which is about 5 years old still going strong. The os is the buggiest experience I've ever had, sluggish, going from portrait the landscape kills UI formatting if it switches to power save it'll skip a video. Boot loops constantly.
Never again I'm afraid it's neat I could fix things with it so quickly but they fail hard past that.
Example navigation buttons have just covered the voyager ui
Navigation buttons covering the Voyager UI is an Android/Voyager bug. It has happened on my last two phones.
Wow. I got the 4 at launch and honestly never had any problems except calls get fucked up more frequently recently. Didn't know they stopped selling parts, what's the point?
They didn't stop selling parts they were just unavailable which when you need them as you say defeats the point.
That's a distinction without a difference. If things are consistently out of stock, they're not actually selling them.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I believe the F6 is likely expected by autumn and was considering this as my next. I often wondered about parts as time goes by, as I suspected the company wouldn't want a huge inventory of spares and the costs involved. If I do get one, I'll likely buy a spare screen at the least.
The UI stuff is disappointing, however maybe not a deal breaker as I'm trying to reduce my usage. Perhaps a buggy smartphone could be a decent dumbphone alternative.
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The headphone jack user to lemmy user ratio is apparently nearly 1:1
Yeah, Lemmy is full of people stuck in their way and insisting older tech is better because they refuse to update
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