5d ago

The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone.

shop.fairphone.com Fairphone 5. Designed for you. Made fair.

Ten swappable spare parts. Eight years of software updates. Five-year warranty. This is Fairphone's most sustainable phone yet.

I don't like smartphones. I use a dumbphone.

But this is a wonderful initiative.

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363 comments

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.
  
  I know that pmos have a pixel 3a port , have been looking into that a while back but not installed yet. Worth checking out
  
  Looks like a lot of "Partial" support. Some concerns:
  volume cannot be applied in software
  On v24.12, the current is limited to 1 Amp and there is no thermal mitigation for charging.
  Maybe it's fine? Idk.
  
  Battery charging is ofc an issue for main driver , but if you can live with it I'd say it's ok , no thermal control shouldn't be an issue at 1 amp . Basically at that you can't use the phone while charging and expect not to run out of juice.
  Volume control yea needs testing I guess. Feels it can be an issue or not
  
  Yeah, I could live with the charging, provided it can charge overnight. The volume is the real concern.

363 comments