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I’ve been watching the Fairphone closely but while I love the idea of a phone designed to last eight years, the price tag is still too high to make it worth buying for me. Since I don’t mind having an older phone, I think I’m still better off buying three decent used phones in succession for about the same total price. By the time I get to the third one in 5 years, it’ll be significantly superior to the then five-year-old Fairphone.
I suppose folks particularly enthusiastic about fair trade and environmentalism might be more interested than I am, but from my perspective as someone who just wants a robust phone for a good price, discarding and replacing still makes more sense than repairing.
As an environmentalist myself, the fairphone is amazing. However, it’s far more ecologically friendly to keep the phone you have until you absolutely have to replace it
Which is exactly what Fairphone says.
The reason it is expensive is because it uses fair trade materials.
You are essentially paying to not use slave labour on your phone.
right. I mean, good for them, but $600 for one phone is just way, way too expensive.
my phone cost me less than $100 second-hand three years ago and it’s still perfectly usable. it’s a budget model with several LineageOS ROMs available, so I’m good with software support. the battery isn’t like new but this was a 5000 mAh model to begin with, so even diminished it’s still good enough. I don’t see me upgrading in the next couple of years.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Fairphone has retained top marks for repairability, with the Dutch manufacturer’s fifth iteration scoring high for software longevity, even if some components are starting to get a little more “conventional.”
The iFixit team pulled apart the latest in the line of modular phones with little more than tweezers and screwdrivers and found the device just as repairable as its predecessors, albeit with one or two compromises.
However, rather than something along the lines of the Core Module of the previous phone, the iFixit team found a motherboard and daughterboard more akin to other Android handsets.
Though it comes with the fastest industrial chip (not a Snapdragon) made by Qualcomm, that puts it squarely in the mid-range rather than rubbing shoulders with more exotic devices.
Fairphone promises five Android version upgrades and at least eight years of security updates, with an aim for a total lifespan of a decade.
Considering the glue-filled horrors out there, combining software longevity with something that has retained much of its predecessors’ modular and repairable design is an impressive feat.
The original article contains 474 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I just wish it was a bit more powerful. I use emulators and stuff on my phone. If anything, I wouldnt mind mine being a little more powerful as it is.
But by the time this one craps out, maybe they will have the Fairphonr 6 or 7. I’m trying to run this one into the ground. Might even get the battery changed just to get another few years out of it.
Got the 4, and it really is a great phone.
You can still buy all the common spare parts for the Fairphone 2 directly from their shop, 8 years after it was released.