FP 3 - but why?

okay, I see. makes sense.
I just wished they would have taken a bit more effort in creating something which is compatible with fp2 parts. Of course they needed a new base and all in all the more compact design needs some new part designs. But parts besides the mainboard and display… whatever. I am also not saying I don’t like the higher capacity batterie, and the design. But now there are so many spare parts produced for a mainboard that obviously can’t handle them. Even if you exchange them, 4 weeks later, you need a new one, or something is not even repairable at all. ):

I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.

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fp produced spare parts for the fp2, but the phone is just not working properly. so it is kind of wasted, because you can’t use them in the fp3

You’re confusing two things here. FP produced spare parts for many FP2s, not only for your FP2. Just because your FP2 doesn’t work properly doesn’t mean the spare parts are useless.

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  1. “The phone” doesn’t exist. There are ones which are working great, and unfortunately the opposite, and everything inbetween.
  2. For phones with problems surely the existence of spare parts is not a waste?
  3. I see one aspect constantly overlooked in this type of discussion … The software would have to support the old parts. That’s a problem, and a big one, because mostly this depends on hardware vendors releasing drivers for their stuff for current Android versions, and hardware which is years old somewhen will be declared EOL and not supported any further. This happened to one of the most crucial parts of the Fairphone 2, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, already, which gives Fairphone all kinds of headaches with their Android 7 (which Qualcomm doesn’t support for the 801).
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I’m a little surprised that nobody has taken you up on your use of the term “straight away”. The FP2 first shipped in 2015, so the FP3 is coming out four years after the FP2. In that time, Samsung have released nearly two hundred new phones — one new model every week! Take a look at any of the major brands on GSM Arena and they’ll be similar. FairPhone are so far from that that I really can’t understand this complaint.

It would be cool if the parts could be reused from one model to the next more easily, but I think it would take some serious engineering and design to enable something like that. In the mean time the performance demands placed on mobile devices are getting ever higher, and support for new technologies is expected. At this point I think an improved FP is well justified.

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Probably the easiest part to keep from one phone to the other would be the casing.
Of course most likely that’s the part lots of people would love to see being changed and available in dozen different colors and materials. :wink:

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Also don’t forget that the whole ARM hardware scene is changing much faster than the desktop Intel scene (which frankly stalled a few years ago). Android now (rightly) needs hardware support for encryption, SOCs have more cores so they can rapidly ramp up and down power consumption so they can run powerful apps/algorithms by reduce power when less is going on…

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I agree wholeheartedly, except for AMD Zen 2 (3000 series) and EPYC. AMD currently blows Intel out of the water price/performance.

If you want FOSS hardware you have a lot less choice though. I suppose the main choices are Raptor Engineering for desktop, NXP i.MX series for ARM, and in the future we’ll see more and more RISC-V.

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