Fairphone novelty (novelties?) to come on 30 September 2021

I’m only using BT headphones anyway, so I’m totaly fine with it. And for those times, they are not charged, I’m fine with using a dongle.

And for those without BT headphones ( and enough bugs in spare… :yum:), FP seems to provide somethingnew anyways. :smiley:

Just out of curiosity, why wouldn’t you want to use a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter? I didn’t like this for my Google Pixel 3, because the battery is weak. And I need that port for audio and charging, which is kind of problematic. But with a Fairphone you can just carry a spare battery, swapping that is done in a minute.

Or why not use USB-C earbuds? Fairphone will also release (most likely) wireless earbuds. I’m now using wireless earbuds for 3 years. The batteries are still great. And I don’t have the problems of broken cables anymore. Which is great for sustainability as well. If Fairphone has earbuds that have replaceable batteries, and you only have to replace them every 6 years or so, then why not? Or are there some statistics about batteries that I’m not aware of?

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There are double adapters with a jack and a USB-C plugs.

I don’t think it’s that good to frequently change batteries, this can mess up battery stats.

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Isn’t Android constantly learning your battery behavior? Sure it will be messed up for a bit, but it should self correct fast enough I guess. In any case I will swap out regularly I think. That will be one of the reasons I’m buying a Fairphone :slight_smile:

Sure, which is why I wrote “regularly”. Of course in the end it won’t make an enormous difference :slight_smile:

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Because of music quality.
As you can check earlier on this thread, I indeed found and published here such an adapter.

But what I feel is, the digital-to-analog converer in this case comes from a completely unknown supplier, with an uncontrolled quality and, I’d say, no guarantee, as with such a low cost nobody will even start a complain.
I agree it’s mostly for music (I have reasonably good closed earphones), but I really see Fairphone saying here “I disengage myself from any responsibility on sound quality, go see your adapter supplier”…

I have in memory that I’ve seen somewhere adapter from Fairphone. I mean that they will sell it as well after the 30th of September. Maybe the quality of that one will be better.

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The fact that they offer two models with different internal storage sizes also suggests that you can’t insert a microSD card anymore. This together with the lack of a headphone jack are in my opinion some of the if not the dumbest decisions Fairphone has made since I got to know the company six years ago.

Replacing and upgrading components are one of the key strategies to reducing e-waste (besides refuse-reduce-reuse-recycle of course) and removing that capability is nothing but counterproductive, causing two easily avoidable scenarios:
1: The customer buys the smaller variant, would need more storage down the line and can’t upgrade, so the phone becomes obsolete quicker.
2: The customer wants to be on the safe side and buys the bigger model despite maybe not needing the extra space at all, so they just wasted money. Since at least some people are going to do that, is more profitable for Fairphone, but a really dickish move.

Secondly, but in my opinion more importantly and even more stupid, the lack of the headphone jack makes their own headphones not work. They fucking made their own accessories obsolete. I can’t even describe how disappointed I am, this is exactly what Apple did 3 years ago with the iPhone 10 and now FP is copying it. This is a disgrace to the original company spirit and values.

I am seriously thinking about wether I want to continue being a Fairphone Angel and recommending Fairphone to people I know. They better have a damn good explanation for their choices on Thursday.

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Can you really hear the difference? And if you’re that serious about sound quality, would a Fairphone be even a consideration? Just asking out of curiosity, you’re free to make these decisions and stand by them of course.

I agree it wouldn’t be great to lose the expansion slot for an SD card. I’m looking forward to sync my entire Nextcloud instance on my phone :nerd_face: But the headphone jack isn’t such a great loss (IMHO of course). You can use the adapter or use earbuds that use USB-C. Standardizing to one port will make life easier. The headphone jack won’t be missed by me. I now by the way have 128GB of internal storage on my Pixel. I take a lot of pics, have a lot of offline music and videos. I sometimes reach a percentage above 50%. But I would find it hard to believe many people need more than 128GB. Again, I would love to have that expansion slot so that I can use terabytes on my phone :slight_smile: But I could do without.

I am waiting to see what happens to the SD card slot, although I wouldn’t see the different internal storage options as such a clear indicator for its demise. However, should the FP4 really come without an SD card slot, this would push me to the edge of departing the project, too.

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I would probably word it differently :slight_smile:

But if there is no SD card, ???

Well I thank my lucky stars my daughter has dumped her 9 month old FP3+ back to me, so I may have spares for a decade.

So waiting to see what the FP5 is going to throw up, if they last that long…

I was going to buy an FP4 for my daughter as he couldn’t cope with the FP3s abilities, but she has opted for an old iphone and doesn’t want to even try the FP4.

This roll out could be not a bad phone but a sad phone :frowning:

The question is how many people do you serve with a SD-slot and how more easy the design is without a SD card. From material usage perspective this question is also relevant, you save material to remove the sd-card slot. I have never used a SD card on my phone.

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As it is an assumption overall, that there is no SD slot - you could as well assume, that there is a dual SIM slot, which can be used for either SIM or SD card.
So there can be either way.
Nevertheless, I think a loss of the SD Card isn’t a big thing for most of people. Either as they use external storage or as they don’t com in either case described by you.
Sure I prefer an SD Card to - and I’m quite optimistic that there will be one - but with cloudstorrage there is no problem on a loss for me.

FP needs to focus on what the majority needs - so if they come to the conclusion, that they can spare on that for costs, repair ability or what so ever - that dose not change the value of FP:
Nobody said, everyone must love all FP devices. there will be on you love and another you don’t. But all in all it is a good decision to move the phone a little more towards mainstream to be able being a real alternative.

And regarding the headphone jack - that’s how things are going - everything is going more and more wireless. If they wouldn’t follow the lead, you could complain on a missing hardware keyboard as well.
Sure they sold wired earbuds in the past - but they don’t anymore. So nobody could feel be-traded for that when buying the new device - especially as they sell a dongle.

Oh and as incoming +1 on what @ocramarco said.

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The thing is, having a headphone jack doesn’t force people to use wired headphones. Having none does force them to use wireless ones. Not only do they cost a lot more, but it simply takes away customer freedom.

And yes, you could buy a dongle, but it would certainly be produced unfairly, without recycled plastics and you’d need to carry it along all the time. It just makes listening to music unnecessarily more annoying and there is no reason to remove connectivity. Also, wired headphones have the benefit that you can’t forget to charge them, which is enough convenience for me to not buy wireless ones. And they also use a lot less resources.

I will look at what FP says during the press conference, but I don’t think that they can bring up convincing arguments.

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Really ??

That goes against my involvement with Fairtrade aspect.

No one needs a phone but probabaly a majority want one.

So do you mean “focus on what the majority wants”

or “focus on what the majority of Fairphone users want”

or “focus on what some subset of future Fairphone buyers want”

???

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One could consider the USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor a module. Weren’t we asking for modularity all the time…?
We have had people complaining about a fine noise in their headphones which usually comes from the DAC being pretty close to CPU etc… By exporting a digital signal to the USB-C socket and putting the DAC outside the phone housing you can get rid of that.
And how often have we asked people with rebooting or otherwise malfunctioning phones if they have tried running their phone without memory card? It would be one question less to ask.
Having tried to find the positive aspects of Fairphone’s decisions I must admit that normally I’m fine with my wired FP modular headphones (especially after I resoldered the microphone/remote control which was way more exciting than buying a new cable) that I can just plug into the phone and that’s it.

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Oh for sure there are reasons. Like 2G frequencies or micro USB connections. Tech is changing and so are connectivity. So moving means you need to drop things from time to time. FMO

@anon9989719 the question is, how to bring as many people as possible to use a fair phone. It just works, if they are interested in your product. So a person who cares about fairtrade and good and uptodate tech - you cant get them on buying a fairphone, if it still looks like the FP 1. So change is normal and change were done from FP1 to FP2 and to FP3 and it needs to be done to FP4. Nobody want’s to buy an old DynaTAC 8000X just because it’s fair.

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Mobile phones without a headphone jack tend to put an analog audio signal on the USB-C port as well so you can use them with a cheap adapter. But there is a good chance that this phone will support digital audio over USB-C as well (maybe even the FP3 already supports this, as this is in fact simply an audio device over USB OTG.)

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I read about this but it seemed like not many mobiles do that, therefore I assumed that the FP4 won’t do this, either. But yes, if this is the case then the adaptor is really simple and just connects the contacts with each other without any DAC or complicated electronics involved.

If I remember correctly even my FP2 is able to run my USB headset via an OTG adaptor.

To get an idea about quality of these adaptors I found this link quite interesting:

I think if you understand all the measurements there you’re qualified to say if the adaptors cause a loss of quality or not :wink:

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