Not sure where to add these… but my favourite ‘feature’ for any new fairphone would be a maintenance subscription.
Let me clarify…
I have a FF1, that I bought because it was fair, and repairable, promising a long life for the valuable resources that wend into it’s production. The device is becoming obsolete because more and more apps are no longer available for it’s OS. Otherwise, it’s still working perfectly and to my satisfaction.
The support for the FF1 has been cancelled because of budgetary reasons. I do appreciate that a company needs to be profitable. That calls for a business model that makes long term support profitable. One way to do so imo is to add a maintenance subscription, such that there is recurring budget to cater for maintenance and OS updates.
Given that many FF customers are interested in having a device that stays with them longer than the average smartphone, I do believe many of these will be prepared to subscribe to a maintenance programme and pay a yearly (or monthly) fee to make sure their phone remains repairable and stays up to date for longer. Clearly also this will have an expiry date. I’d hope this can be stretched >8 to 10 years
That was in May 2017. “Next year” would have been about a year ago. I know that the phone was still in concept phase in October 2018 according to this comment but that’s already 4 months ago now, has there been any changes on a possible delivery date?
I’m still hesitant in paying the full price for a FP2 when the FP3 might be coming out “any time soon”…
I can’t answer your question, I only saw that Miquel Ballester was part of the “Experiences in repairing and recycling electronic products from the solidarity economy, companies and the public sector” panel 4 at http://mobilesocialcongress.cat/en/speakers/
Oh, not enough characters for a reply? Okay, then…
I’m certainly among those who would love to see the FP3 have a mainboard that’s interchangeable with the FP2 mainboard, so I can reuse my case, screen and some other modules.
I would also like to see a mainboard & firmware utilizing more features of the used hardware not only half of it.
Higher bluetooth version (FP2 has 4.0, but according to Wiki 4.1 is only software related…), but now BT5.x should be implemented of course
For whom’s sake, use a (more) better camera(s). FP2 Snapdragon 801 SoC could go up to 21MP, but we have only 12MP (3k x 4k), which initially was only 8MP.
It seems (according to the new Huawei P30 serie) that taking photos and videos is even more important these days than “old school phoning”
Make use of the Quickcharge feature since it’s implemented in the SoC
I guess NFC is here to stay…
HD & Wifi calling (simply implement it so it’s up to the user to maybe switch provider to get it enabled)
SD 801 could address a lot more of ram, so why stick to only 2GB…
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A lot more features could have been utilized. For my needs FP2 was quite alright, but these days mobiles have to be a lot more feature rich. Cutting the SoC down for lowering the costs may not be helpful to get enough units sold.
I partially agree on this.
The problem actually is the need of updated drivers (often Blobs) from Google & chipset drivers from Qualcomm to keep the OS up to date aswell.
But if, as with our SD801, Google & Qualcomm don’t support this anymore not delivering any more driver updates Fairphone now is stuck.
That’s the situation with Android 7. Now FP is struggling to get Nougat (fully) operational also with things like hardware video acceleration or switching the sim cards on/off by software etc.
They have to replace the missing code and recode what’s needed without the sources of Google & Qualcomm. SD801 could do for some more time, but Android7 now is imho at about 80% functionality. Where many users rather see bugs there are also missing features which we had in former Android version as you can read here.
After all lifetime is also in the hands of Google and Qualcomm.
Me, I see loads of phones with fancy SOCs out there but they only have one single USB 2.0 port, so there’s no way to have a low lag wired connection to a portable external monitor. You have to buy a separate laptop for that. The SOC supports DisplayPort over USB 3.1 generation 1/gen 2 or even a separate video output port, but not most phones out there. For me, a real computer phone is only future proof and sustainable if it has this feature.
Which is why I’m such a fan of Qualcomm’s upstream driver project. @z3ntu could tell you more about this. It seems to be too little too late for Fairphone to pick it up for the FP2, but it’d be amazing if we can get the quality to a point that LineageOS could pick it up and keep providing updated kernels and user-space drivers indefinitely!
