Many components in the FP are simply being bought. And if you by fast components, they will be more expensive than slower ones. They are not necessarily “better” in quality or “more” but simply more expensive because the companies manufacturing them put a lot of effort into research and need to recover their investments. Just think of a PC processor: You can buy one from intel with 2 cores and 2 GHZ or you can buy one with 4 cores and 2,5 GHZ or one with 8 cores and 3,5 GHZ and many many other combinations. It is usually not much more expensive to make a fast processor compared to making a slow one, but they offer different levels to serve a broader customer spectrum. The same applies to the FP2 internals. It is much much faster and has more expensive components, that hopefuly will last longer than the FP1. Fairphone did not make every single tiny component of the phone themselves. That would be impossible.
The FP1 is not a perfect phone, the FP2 also isn’t. It’s just a step closer to it
The FP1 was a first step into making sustainable and fair phones and the FP2 is the next step in that direction. And the FP3 will be another big step and will trump many of the FP2’s achievements. Just because the one is better than the other, it doesn’t mean that the other is crap. So don’t get confused. If you’re happy with your FP1, that is excellent!!!
Re-design can be fine …
I think it’s good to have the fairphone redesigned to eleminate some weaknesses of the FP1. For example, I currently might have to buy a complete new motherboard for 120 EUR (and cause some more suffering and damage in other parts of the world) just because one pin in the USB socket is broken. I do hope the FP2 is better concerning such topics, but the FP2’s main board costs 320 EUR which makes me fear also the FP2 is not the crown of repairability and thus sustainability.)
The delevopment costs for the FP2, however, are stated as 33 EUR.
…BUT re-powering is not necessary:
As said before, I consider it unnecessary to climb into a different power class with the FP2. Moritz compared this with the different classes of PC processors. For my job I in fact need a notebook with 4 cores, but this is only because I have to work with 3D models. For any other work I (and most people I know) perform on the notebook, the “2 core 2 GHz” Moritz mentioned would absolutely do.
And it’s the same with the phone: I don’t need a phone which is MUCH faster and has many more pixels than the FP1. Again, I’m pretty sure a lot of potential fairphone buyers don’t need this either - and CAN simply not afford it.
2 different FPs are possible!
So I come back to the suggestion of two fairphones with different power levels. Jerry mentioned, for example, two FP types would be difficult to handle and therefore severely increase handling costs. - Well, I can’t imagine that storing and selling two types of phones would be so difficult: There are some hundreds of thousands of ebay and street sellers in this world and most of those have a huge portfolio spreading from beer to headphones up to hair shampoo - and they all can easily deal with all these hundreds of different products.
Okay, the development costs could be be higher (yet, how about synergies??), but the circle of customers would sure increase a lot if there was (s)lower, still sustainable fairphone class phone below the, lets’s say, somewhat magic 399 EUR limit.
Hi, Stefan, thanks for your hint. However, in Berlin, I’ve been in two repair shops with good reputation. Both knew and actually liked the fairphone. But the first shop owner totally refused to do any soldering work at phone boards. The second one was initially very enthusiastic and found out that the socket itself is broken and re-soldering it onto the board wouldn’t help. He promised to get a new socket and to solder it onto the board (for around 50 EUR). But the next day he told me, his parts dealer wouldn’t have this socket type on offer so he couldn’t help me.
Fairphone’s customer ‘support’ hasn’t replied to my corresponding ticket since May 28th.
-> Do you know any source for the type of USB sockets used in FP1? (Thanks in advance.)
Hi Irina, thanks for the helpful link!
But according to that thread, replacing the FP1’s USB socket seems to be a pretty hard job with a good chance of wrecking the entire board.
From that thread, another link leads to some Berlin Fairphoner who has recently dealt with similar problems. I hope that he can help me but he’s probably gonna be quite busy during the summer…
(And I hope future fairphones will really be more sustainable so that FP2 users won’t have be put off to another new generation when the first FP2s start showing signs of wear…)
Well, I wouldn’t dare to solder it myself, but if you buy the part (it’s really cheap) and take it to the repairshop, maybe they can do it. Of course there’s a risk to wreck the mainboard, but since the alternative is to replace it anyway, I think it might be worth a try.
Another thing that’s possible would be to live without the USB socket. An external universal charger and a second battery could provide you a more or less comfortable power supply. Data exchange could be done by bluetooth or wifi.
I suppose there are no networks in your country offering the FP2 on a contract? I’m in the UK and earning well below the national average, and I also would not be able to fork out 450 GBP for the handset only, but the Co-op mobile network offers it on a range of contracts starting at 25 GBP, which is the one I took. I was burned by my first month of reckless data usage, but even on my low income I can afford what amounts to less than £1 a day.
I found that Co-op had priced themselves a little too high and hadn’t taken into account the potentially longer lifespan of the FP2, writing the cost of the phone off over 2 years on the 24 month contract. Fortunately I was in the position to purchase the phone outright and continue with a sim only contract on Vodafone, in my mind, writing the FP2 off over 3 years (but hoping for longer). A bit of a gamble perhaps, but in the long run, cheaper. I was quite disappointed by Co-op mobile…which forced me to look at other options… Initially I was trying to move away from Vodafone but when it turned out Co-op were using them for 4G anyway…it made the decision a lot easier!
The cost factor of a phone is interesting, and I think it really has to be looked at in a way of writing it off over a chosen period of time.
Yes, the Co-op contracts are a little higher than my previous sim-only contract with EE, so I’ve had to settle for 3G only for the time being. Supposedly they use EE for their mobile coverage too, which also made my decision easier. I haven’t had 4G yet, so I suppose I don’t know what I’m missing!
The writing-it-off-over-time model definitely seems like the right way to look at the cost here, like you said, I’m hoping for 3 years use at the very least; that’s what I’ve managed from handed-down iPhones, and my expectation is that with the FP2 I should far exceed that!
