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World's First Modular Smart Phone Hits the Market
An anonymous reader writes: Out before the much anticipated Google Modular Phone Project ARA, is a new phone from Fairphone: The Fairphone 2. This phone is claimed to be the the worlds first real modular phone. Fairphone is more than just a phone manufaturer but a social justice movement . Fairphone is a project of Waag Society, Action Aid and Schrijf-Schrijf to raise awareness about conflict minerals in consumer electronics and the wars that the mining of these minerals is fueling in the DR Congo. The Fairphone 2 build consists of 5-inch Full HD LCD screen, Android 5.1 Lollipop,Dual SIM, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Qualcomm quad core processor.
bark less.
Some awareness that was apparently raised by the creation of this phone about conflict minerals in DR Congo. Awareness not apparently being which minerals, what wars, and what evidence there is that depriving DR Congo of business is going to help them. More importantly, by avoiding conflict minerals, what is being sacrificed to make this phone: you don't get something for nothing.
I know I know, I should just "know". But I don't, and I'm not going to google it and deal with all the hipster shit either, I want facts and primary sources that at least try not to sound like Sally Struthers. That's awareness. A phone is a phone.
Nice clean, bright Fairphone shirts, being washed in the that nice clean water in the background. And that nostalgic phone!
I use my Fairphone in my hugcircle in my safe space. Where do you use yours?
"social justice movement" is a link to a PDF.
They are trying to do what we wish all manufacturers would do, make devices repairable, upgradeable, and built of sustainable raw materials.
I truly hope they will succeed, but they have to make something competitive with manufacturers that don't tie a hand behind their backs, because cheaper phones make more profits, and more profits make better phones. I trade with the Good Enough Markets (Africa, South America, Asia) and the buyers of used phones want whatever is the best phone for the least cost. The minute they make some compromise that reduces quality and value, they will lose scaleability and traction. To achieve value, you must achieve scale of production, and that requires a wee bit of ruthlessness.
Good Luck, Fair Phone Guys. Don't try to be perfect, just be better.
Gently reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder how many times you can put this phone back together?
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Swapping out internal components is one thing, but when I think of a modular phone I envision one of the modules being a full hardware QUERTY keyboard.
Sigh... nope.
If you actually use this phone in the real world, it will be glitching like an old school Nintendo game when dust, dirt and corrosion get between the contacts of all the "modular" components.
Honestly, every time I've ever purchased a newer mobile device, the old one seemed to have become equally deficient across all its specs - RAM, flash storage, screen size/quality, and camera resolution/quality. I've never once thought "Gee, it's awesome to be rocking Ice Cream Sandwich, a 480x800 3.7" display, 512MB RAM, a 1GHz single core CPU, and 8GB of flash, but man - this 8MP camera sure is killin' me!"
Sure, repairability is a nice feature, but it's not difficult to replace the display assembly on a modern iPhone (I've done it myself, and it takes less than 5 minutes if you've got the proper tools). You're likely looking at an entire replacement phone anyway if you've killed the motherboard (example: water damage), or smashed the housing up too badly (fell in a blender, 50' drop, etc.)
Spec wise, this seems similar to the unlocked Blu phones Best Buy sells. If you're not making a "flagship killer", you're caught in a very competitive race to the bottom. I get that this is supposed to be better for the Earth or conflict regions where rare earths are mined, but there's got to be a way to ease your conscience without such pathetic hardware specs.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Will it run Replicant (or another fully-open set of code)?
I want a phone where all the code, even the radio and other driver code, is open, to minimize hiding places for spy- and other malware.
Down with binary blobs. (Especially things like radio binary blobs which are later found to have access to the file system.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Modular, designed to be repaired, ongoing work to support other operating systems.
What I don't like:
Baseband does not support US LTE frequencies
Ultra liberal vibe is a little over the top
Just in case anyone in the US or elsewhere in the Americas is considering one of these, know that you won't get any LTE reception, and in the US, you'll only get 3G reception on the 1900 band used by AT&T or (in some places) by T-Mobile. It doesn't support AT&T's 850 band and or T-Mobile's 1700 (AWS) band.
In short, this is designed by Europeans, for Europeans.
www.gaiageek.com
Apple iPhones are very close to being Conflict Material Free, if that's your bag...
Just sayin'.
How is this company auditing suppliers?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Two points:
1. Several commentators elsewhere have noted that "blood minerals", like "blood diamonds", are not the root cause of the problem of violence and slavery in such countries. Social and governmental upheaval and disorder are the root issue, that will not be solved just by banning these commodities. Take away blood minerals, and the people of the regions affected by these problems will still have conflicts, just around some other valuable materials. The commodities for phones merely serve as the current vehicle for the conflict to be manifested. Much as college students want that to be the quick fix, by boycotting one thing, that will not solve the problem.
2. The second point is that frequently the best thing that can be done to control and regulate the impacts of a commodity / mining / illicit trading / etc is that the sourcing of it is more concentrated, responsible in fewer entities or companies, who can be clearly identified. Apple in this regard has done more as the responsible party for sourcing hundreds of millions of iPhones and documenting their environmental / social impact than any other small phone maker. In fact, I might suggest that the more you incentivize small, local shops to make their own special version of a phone, the more opportunity there is for exploitation and inconsistency from your humanitarian vision.
There are lots of downsides to the commodities and technologies needed to supply our gadgets, but given that demand is not going to be the level to be pulled here, I don't buy that this movement will solve them.
It'll make a good iPod replacement so I'm in
Was not the whole point that it never needs an update?
Just what I want and desperately need, more militantly dysfunctional subjectivist Marxist bullshit in my objectively functional technology.
Before I know it my pull requests are going to be totally triaged by feels and privilege checks, my render times will be doubled due to mid-bucketing RGB diversity checks, and my login password will have to include an entire freaking ASCII table so none of it feels unfairly excluded by the Literaryarchy.
Openmoko comes to mind. The Neo OpenMoko has a Host USB port which suggests that we shouldnt jurisdictionally forfeit a valid micro computer to phone regulatione just because it is palmsized with a speaker and microphone.
I would prefer the phone service network just an external device like how Sierra Wireless and Novatell make a wifi Hotspot device that i can relocate the transmitter to a safer spot on my automobile roof or use an external antenna. Of course, i prefer to have dual wifi and dual Flashcard on a handheld rather than bottleneck my hardware with integrated proprietary cell network hardware. Shouldnt need to change computers when you change internet service likewise. Waiting for a bridge between desktop and handheld.
Seriously? What the fuck, can anything but a Nexus line device actually run the latest OS...ever? This is a joke
Basically, if you go off the beaten path of mainstream, be prepared for things to really really suck.
LOL, remember when Europeans still built cell phones?
I rather like mine, although unfortunately just like the Fairphone 2 here, it doesn't support the frequencies my wireless carrier uses and as such is completely useless to me as a cellphone. Alas!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
This has always been an Americas based problem where they deviated from the standard bands that the rest of the world standardised on. hence many manufacturers make a US based phone and a rest of the world version.
I kind of wish Silent Circle's Android they use for Black Phone was a general distribution that these other device makers can license. Perhaps with an auditing fee and certification process, because of course people have to make money on a distro some how.
It's one thing to be ethically aware and environmental aware, but can't we also be security aware too?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The first modular phone will not be the Fairphone 2, but the first one that is available in the US.
So far, it's been 0/3 including:
Jolla
Fairphone
Fairphone 2
If anything, is there a (non-Apple, non-WinMo) phone that is available in the US, wanted the world over, but only available in the US?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You can mash together any combination of the pieces of shit with your bare hands. This way, you can customise an excrement objet d'art that's perfect for you.
It doesn't get very good reception, though.
For $730 it's way too expensive. You can get a good samsung for under $200 or a phone with similar specs like the zen phone for $300. Then why would you want to pull out the camera or other bits ? The only thing I would want is to be able to swap the parts into a keyboard case, but looks like no keyboard is available.
This is a step in the right direction.
I would buy it if a physical keyboard and booting (real) Linux was possible.
I'm *still* using my N900 due to the slide-out keyboard. Does this thing have such a feature as an available module? Couldn't find the info at least on product's page...
I was just showing my students the other day that you could in fact make your very own mobile phone - even a smartphone if you so should wish.
If you have no clue about this, or think I'm BS'ing you a little - well - search youtube and google and you shall find numerous people building their own phones. All you need is an microcontroller of your own choice (or several if you want it to become powerful and do various tasks independent of the main cpu). And Arduino projects these days are as modular as it can get, you can purchase temperature sensors, gyro sensors, accelerometers, gps modules, gprs modules,touch screens and everything you need to make your own phone. Sure - it will look like something you just made out of LEGO - but you can use your prototype to just take the Open Source hardware and put it together as a schematic which you in turn can send to some Chinese PCB manufacturer who'd gladly print just 20 of them for you for pocket change (people do this all the time, I'm not kidding!) and you and your friends have your latest creation. Might not be an Apple i2000x something something - but it's yours and doesn't come more personal than that.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Locked-down radio firmware is basically inevitable (the FCC won't approve software-defined radios lacking "robust" protection against unauthorized modifications by end users who aren't ham radio operators), and Nvidia & Qualcomm will probably be binary-blob assholes forever, but it would still be nice if someone finally made a Nexus-like phone whose official ROM was AOSP-derived and could be built from source into a ROM image identical to the "official" one with all required source, binary blobs, and build scripts neatly downloadable from the manufacturer.
I had great hopes for the Oppo Find 7 and OnePlus One, but both phones dropped the ball and let down users by (sort of) supporting a proprietary build of Cyanogenmod that couldn't actually be built or modified by end users. Sure, you could still use the Cyanogen source to build a generic ROM for it, but then you had to give up features that Oppo & OnePlus's official ROMs supported.
Android: the nominally-open operating system that runs on some of the most locked-down and opaque hardware ever made, and is practically unusable as a viable phone if Google's proprietary apps and services are missing. For all intents and purposes, Android 6 isn't much easier for end users to customize in unblessed ways than Windows Mobile used to be. Five years ago, there was enormous optimism at XDA-Developers that we were just months away from having phones where we could download the source and build our own ROMs that worked exactly the way we wanted them to work. Most of that optimism has been replaced by cynicism (in large part because every new kernel catastrophically breaks all the binary blobs from the previous version... often, the only binary blobs that are available at all...) and the sad tragedy that most current android customization consists of doing the same thing we used to do under Windows Mobile... copy binaries ripped from newer phones onto older ones in the hope that they'll halfway work.
Will it run Replicant (or another fully-open set of code)?
AOSP initialy,
Sailfish is being worked on.
https://www.fairphone.com/2015/09/23/opening-up-fairphone-to-the-community-open-source-fairphone-2/
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I was interested until you said this.
Now the project needs to die.
Fairphone attempts to bring more sustainability into smartphone production. And they want to see if it is possible at all. And you can be the judge as to how successful they are so far. They are a lot more transparent than other companies.
You can read everything on their website.
Even if you aren't very excited about the concept of a sustainable word, there is still a lot of interesting things about smartphone production to be found in general.
And of course: Since they are very transparent about what they do, you can also find a lot of things that you don't like. Which is a good reason why companies usually shy away from transparency.
Can one remove the GSM / 3G module to make it a non-tracked device?
On the purchase page.
"Designed for use and service in Europe only"
Well there goes that.
This "safe space" you speak of - does the sun shine in it?
"We wish all manufactures... make devices repairable, upgradeable, and built of sustainable raw materials"
Who exactly is this "we" you are talking about? Sure as fuck isn't me. I want my phone to be cheap and disposable. The end.
Based on the sales numbers of iPhones, you think Joe consumer gives two craps about repair or upgrade or sustainability? The "expensive and disposable" business model seems to be working just fine too.
But thanks for speaking for "we." We weren't sure who we were.
Most people run Lua on the ESP8266 and there are no Adruino compatible environments for it.