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Planned Sequel To Fairphone Promises an Ethical, Repairable Phone
New submitter sackvillian writes: An article in Wired reports on the ongoing development of the Fairphone 2, planned for European release in September. The phone is the follow-up to the Indiegogo-funded original that inevitably had room for improvement. The manufacturers promise a modular phone with an emphasis on repairability and expandability, with otherwise respectable specs (Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, 2GB RAM, Dual SIM, 8MP camera). It runs on a customized Android 5.1. So, the inevitable question arises — would you be willing to sacrifice some performance (and pay a significant premium) for a phone that's repairable, moddable, and ethical?
Rooted, Xposed, Xprivacy, firewall? Or is it about the ferric trichloride that goes into the river?
As long as you can easily replace the screen. WAAYYYYYY too easy to break. Might also depend on the cost of the replacement parts. If a screen is $100, I'd rather just stick with a low end phone that is "good enough" for what I use it for, and just buy another one if it breaks.
This is the whole scam behind 'ethical' products. They always claim there's a price premium. It's bullshit.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Thanks, but no, thanks. I'll get an environment-poisoning, non-customizable Chinese junk instead.
Willing to sacrifice a lot of performance (Galaxy S4 is already massive overkill and it's not even considered relatively fast anymore) but no, not willing to pay a "premium." I will go with cheap Chinese disposable crap before I pay huge money for modular.
But a phone that I can turn into something I want, remove everything I don't and don't have to throw away just 'cause some wearing part experiences its expected demise?
Sounds like something I'd want.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As opposed to an "unethical" phone? WTF is this supposed to mean, and who exactly is the arbiter that determines which phones are "ethical", and which ones are not? Somehow I bet this person is affiliated with this project, which makes their views on the "ethics" of other people's possessions rather suspect.
Most phones these days are all the same. Widescreen display, touch interface. This makes sense.
I hope we get to a point where you could have a keyboard, a giant battery, different aspect ratio. Every phone now looks like a iPhone (which copied my HTC One m7).
And BTW, this may be my last comment on /. since they got rid of the comments text under the summary, cut polls from the sidebar, and forced Video Bytes into the feed. These changes should never have been forced onto the community. Some could have been made user options. Very sad day for me thinking about saying goodbye for reals after almost 20 years. :-(
Promises an Ethical, Repairable Phone
It runs on a customized Android 5.1,
Does.... not... compute.
Will it be repairable? The story icons and comment counts now block the story subjects.
This one reads: "Planned Sequel To Fairphone Promises an Ethical Pep????ble F????"
Well done.
Sorry but you can get several smartphones today running android with better than 8MP cameras which are capable of shooting 4k video. Why would someone want to pay a premium for 1080p video?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Oh, God, YES! Ethical? Are you kidding me!? I would sell your left kidney to get me one!
>> sacrifice some performance (and pay a significant premium) for a phone that's repairable, moddable, and ethical
Today I pay about $50 for each of my and my family's Android smart phones (1Ghz proc, 4" screen, 1GB RAM), plus another $25 for SD card and case. I'm definitely giving up performance, but I'm doing so to get an essentially disposable phone (if a kid loses it, meh). I don't need "repairable" and if I ever wanted to switch phone providers, I could still dump and rebuy all five phones off my month-to-month contract cheaper than it would cost many people to switch a single iPhone between "premium" carriers.
> would you be willing to sacrifice some performance (and pay a significant premium) for a phone that's repairable, moddable, and ethical?
To a certain extent, yes. I tend to buy more than I really need and then keep it until it doesn't work anymore. I have the special tools necessary to take apart phones that don't have user replaceable batteries, because I have a fundamental issue with tossing an otherwise functional phone just because the battery won't take a charge anymore. (You can usually find step by step instructions online, and most cell batteries are available on amazon.) Similarly, screens are not that difficult to replace. I chafe at this "disposable" mindset perpetuated by manufacturer "incremental improvement" release cycles and aided by carriers hiding the true cost of the phone in the monthly fee.
All that said, for a repairable, moddable, ethical phone, I won't pay thousands of dollars, and I won't put up with 2004 level performance. For instance. So the question becomes, what is a balance that works? Second question might be, why would I have to sacrifice performance if I'm already resigned to paying a premium?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How a phone using Android 5.1 can be ethical ? I was so tempted but, it has to be on Ubuntu to be ethical...
swappable battery is big
I agree with you. I use a Motorola Moto G 2nd gen dual SIM myself, costing about $200 new. That is my upper limit for a phone, simply because it is disposable in my eyes. No amount of cheap replacement parts helps if it gets stolen. I would never pay for a top-of-the-line unit; less so when I get a device whose performance might make it useless once new upgrades of the software rolls out. The allure of the expensive units has always been that they usually lasts longer.
The crux is that 'ethics' and 'sustainability' always gets used as a crutch for holding up an otherwise sub-par product. It smells of snake-oil, of selling to gullible hippies; people will fear being made fools off. I do not belive that ethical and sustainable products would have to be more than 20%-30% more expensive than comparable products, if done right. But most of the time it seems like a way for people in the supply chain to make more money by targeting people who do not care about price. This in fact hampers adoption of these products.
1: radio 2: screen 3: Camera/flash 4: battery: 5: computer 6:Case - speakers, connectors, ancillary things. All of these have different lifespans. The computer is something most of us want to upgrade yearly. The rest is dependent on damage/random time. I would pay 10% more to get something that let me easily replace any one of these 5 things.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Because (assuming it is like fairphone 1) it does not ship with the google apps and services. You can use fdroid to install opensource apps and whichever search engine you want.
And BTW, this may be my last comment on /.
Your comment about this resonates with me. These changes to the presentation of the site -- cutting polls from the side, forcing the Video Bytes, and, most recently, the positioning of the "share on social media" in place of the normal "Read More" -- has severely disappointed me.
Of course, I'm a techie. I *could* whip up a Greasemonkey script to rearrange or hide certain elements. I *could* roll with the changes and move on with life. But that's not the point. The changes to Slashdot represent trends that have made me lose confidence in the direction of the site. The changes are removing my enjoyment of visiting this site in the first place.
I'll also open this can of worms: There seems to be an editorial trend of posting stories about certain societal topics. Namely, stories about (under-)representations of minorities (or in the case of gender, the non-minorities) in various areas of the tech world. There have been stories promoting character assassination, such as the story that glibly claimed that Linus Torvalds is turning-away 'people' in the kernel development community.
There may be some fertile ground for discussion about those kinds of topics. I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and say that I don't want to read those stories because they don't conform to my world view.
But there is definitely not room for insightful discussion in the particular stories about "social issues in tech" shared by the editorial staff lately. I strongly feel that Slashdot is posting more and more stories designed to manufacture outrage rather than spark insightful discussion.
Or, Slashdot posts topics that aren't even worth discussion. Ask Slashdot: Why shouldn't I just set a system-wide setting so that division by zero results in zero? Jeeeeesus, what the HELL is that? I felt insulted that the editorial staff felt that was worth discussion.
Reading and commenting in Slashdot has always been a frivolous use of my time, but it was frivilous enjoyment. Now it's a frivolous waste. I don't want to be here anymore.
The main thing that keeps me from buying a smartphone is that I have two choices: pay through the nose or accept an OS made by an advertising company. If these guys find a way to decrapify Android, I'm in.
939 comments re: divide by zero.
Looks like it was in fact worth a certain amount of discussion.
No. Fairphone along with all phones have the same fatal flaw. A cellular modem with extremely buggy firmware built into the CPU with shared access to memory. I'll take a Neo900 thank you. Modem is on separate chip with a watchdog that resets it when it is supposed to be off and tries to do something.
Every year or two I'm able to get a new phone, each much better than the last. These solutions in search of a problem just lock you into a particular phone size, when normal phones get thinner and nicer-looking.
Reading and commenting in Slashdot has always been a frivolous use of my time, but it was frivilous enjoyment. Now it's a frivolous waste. I don't want to be here anymore.
This.
I'd pay a premium for a phone that wasn't a wireless beacon for every fucktard in the country.
Would I pay more for mobile phones to become an open platform where I can load whatever OS I want and swap out parts with reasonably standardizable interfaces? Hell yes I would.
While I have no opinion about "ethics" of tin and gold but there is nothing I hate more in this industry than insatiable trend of a few massive companies to continue to consolidate their power over everything.
used phones are better, used samsungs are best: cheap, parts, repair documentation, ubiquitous, 5000 to 9000 mAh batteries, mostly root/rom-able.
It's one thing to call something "ethical" over and over again, but since the only reason to do it is to subversively imply that your competitors' products are !ethical, and without offering a basis, it is in and of itself, unethical.
Just because being small, light, convenient, and easy to carry is incompatible with today's millennial culture of entitlement, doesn't mean it is unethical.
A chunk of the extra cost comes from small volume production.
That's a flawed circular argument. The small volume production is a result of the greedy excessive pricing (and perhaps also a result of lower quality that consumers don't want to buy). There is no reason that a good affordable high quality repairable phone should suffer from small volume production.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
As far as replacing parts is concerned, you can always pop a new battery or memory card (at least on non-iOS devices). By the time a non-replaceable part is gone, chances are that other parts are also getting old and you probably need a new phone anyway. If you want to spare the money buy a ~$400+ phone, and if you don't, you can get a ~$100 model that does everything your old phone did, and use the old phone for a simpler purpose just like you would do with an old laptop. If you still insist on replacing the part, you can always go to a "mobile hospital" (there are literally hundreds here in India, and I've seen one or two in pretty much every major US city) and get the screen, camera, or charger port replaced. Spares are available for everything. If you did the same replacement on a Fairphone, the most you would be saving on is the labor that the mobile repair guy would be charging. And even that savings would probably get lost because the Fairphone modules would be costly because of their low volumes, proprietary physical interface, and 'ethical manufacturing'. Sure, it's ethical for the big picture and Gaia would be so happy, but it's probably cruel to my communications budget which is already getting bled dry paying ridiculous prices for mobile data. $10 for 3 long youtube videos over your data limit? It's highway robbery out there.
As far as actual customization goes, the smartphone OS and hardware ecosystem pretty much has you locked in place. You can't really remove any features. Want a phone without a camera? you'll either have a half-functional phone (no QR codes, etc.), or you'll have a buggy piece of shit. Maybe the developer of your favorite app did the right thing and added a check for a camera, but most likely he just programmed it to go straight to the camera and getImage(). Want a phone without a GPS to go with your tinfoil hat? It's most likely coupled with some other useful part (like a modem) in a module, and even if you could take it out, the Google WiFi SSID-based location system's already got your exact location within 3 feet as soon as you turn on the WiFi. Want a phone with a bigger camera? Why not get the extra processing power that it would end up needing anyways and get the newest and biggest Samsung, HTC or Xiaomi. Wanna upgrade GPU, CPU, RAM or root storage? Fuggedaboutit - It's probably soldered to the base phone and/or inside an SoC chip. Want a new OS? Good luck finding anything that is worth switching to and will run reliably unless your phone sold at least a 100,000 copies. Want a bigger battery or a wireless charging system? Most good and recent-ish phones can be easily fitted with one.
You can't compare the IBM PC platform to these SoC phones, and here's why:
1. The choice of internal components is very limited, and a lot of stuff is combined into one chip. There are 3-4 major SoC vendors out there. Same goes for the Camera CCDs, sensors, and all the chips that go in there. Compare that to the ~10 major graphics card and motherboard manufacturers in the market. Or the ~40 different types of CPUs you can install on a given motherboard socket.
2. Unlike a desktop OS with replaceable drivers, an Android OS image has to already have all the drivers it needs installed in the image. With a desktop OS you get an installer that lets you install it on any compatible hardware. With a smartphone OS, the install takes a team of 40 engineers 6 months of work, day and night, after which they release the OS image (which still has fucking bugs in it, mind you, till they iron half of them out with every +.001 version). Or some smart kid makes the install using Cyanogen or something in one all nighter, but it ends up having bugs that never go away because the kid got bored of the project or got hired to that team of 40 engineers.
3. The choice of manufacturers and models at different price points is simply fucking crazy. There are easily hundreds of smartphone/tablet manufacturers out there if you know how to look beyond what Best Buy/Verizon will sell you. You can pretty
Yes in case you didn't know your current phone relies on overworked/underpaid labor, Creates a great deal of greenhouse gasses (in manufacturing), and uses hazardous materials.
So there's a lot of room for improvement in reducing harm inflicted by your purchase of a smartphone. I don't say that to make you feel bad, but I don't know maybe you should.