Energy efficiency about streaming isn’t a big issue at all when using Miracast or Chromecast as one can charge the phone if needed. I’d like to know the performance of Miracast while streaming/mirroring the screen since that works certainly with all apps. Don’t know about Chromecast and whether it’s possible to share from any app or just certain apps. Anyhow, if there’s someone trying it, would be glad to know how the quality of the stream of a movie documentary or whatever is decent enough.
Google invests a lot in desktop mode and it’s becoming mature. With 2TB of storage it’s a viable laptop replacement for regular tasks. It doesn’t work well on my FP5 (low framerate and artifacts). I was hoping it would be better with the FP6, but it got this downgrade. This trend is called convergence and it’s a sustainable development. Do more with less. Remote control can be done over WiFi (YouTube for example). I don’t use streaming myself.
Google wants to unify ecosystem and somehow merge Android and Chrome OS. And IMO it’s a good thing, phones are powerful enough to replace PC at least in some areas, just most of them are artificially stripped down to dumb devices for media consumption.
If the device doesn’t support an essential feature you need then you don’t buy it. By all means give Fairphone feedback if you feel they’ve made a mistake. But a hardware limitation as a result of a design decision won’t get fixed. Shiftphone seems to have usb 3.
Their reason was clear. A lower price on launch and it was lower. The FP6 was only a £30 or so more expensive than the FP5 was still selling for (on Fairphone’s own store). If it cost £100 more just for this one feature would it have sold as well?
This feature does not cost 100 GBP, please stop joking. It was design decision for sure, but I think it was dictated by reusing some components like FPC connectors and moving SIM and microSD slots from top to bottom unit. And for me is even more bizarre, because some other components like for example USB port component itself is not shared with FP5, is very similar but slightly different, and this one simple decision also increases price.
I haven’t used chromecast / miracast or however they call it these days for years. When I tried it, performance was bad, image artifacts due to compression, sync issues and so on. Also, definitely didn’t work with all apps, needed app support. So using with a browser or an alternative youtube client was not possible. Could be better now, don’t know.
Did anyone ever try desktop mode with the FP6?
Maybe it does support USB 3 even if the specs don’t say it, could be for licensing reasons or because the spec is not fully implemented, or the phone didn’t completely pass some giant test suite.
Oh, so you just assumed that difference in final price is related only to this one feature? And what about different main frame (alu vs composite), screen (you can compare price in official shop), and probably other elements. Should we ignore all other changes?
Although noboby really knows, the current flagship Qualcomm SoCs are esrimated to cost around 150-200 Dollars. Thus, you can tell me a lot, but no one will convince me, that the USB 2.0 downgrade had more impact than maybe 10-20 Euro.
Well you also need 14 traces on the mainboard, the connector from the mainboard to the bottom board, and from the bottom board to the USB-C module. Then you have to test and certify the traces and b2b can handle the increase in speed and there isn’t interference from/to other parts.
Or you just run the 6 regular 2.0 traces and be done with it
I’m not really sure if the second most active discussion on FP6 (after the community event; so theoratically the most active “real” discussion) would count as “few interactions”.
That said, maybe a survey of FP users and community would hold a more clear image for FP (also when clear that eventually the users negatively effected by this decision would hold their flags higher). Also it would be maybe nice to involve more of the community in some usability design decisions similar to what Shift does (which sometimes can be understood/go wrong as we’ve seen with SP 8/8.1)
You got this wrong, because I was not referring to this topic here and second just because now some people are very loud it doesnt mean at all they are the majority.
Shift is way smaller and has a complete different approach and the current design of the FP6 is resulting from user feedback: too heavy, too big, battery too small
I guess you’ve never heard of the term vocal users? there’s always going to be a small number of people who will continually complain about a missing feature while the rest just carry on as normal. This sort of thing takes me back to the old days of Apple forums where the lack cut and paste was the end of the world on early iPhones. People who clearly shouldn’t have bought the product until it had the feature they wanted. No point buying a device that doesn’t do what you want and then flooding forums with displeasure.
This is a hardware decision and thus you won’t be getting a USB upgrade in a firmware update. The decision has been made, buy something else if you desperately need USB3 and desktop connectivity. I expect Fairphone will have done some market research about who really needs this feature.
I just hope that this blind shoot will pay off and Fairphone will survive.
PS. IMO It’s still to big, to heavy, but I just guess that major of users also doesn’t care about this part of specification/design decisions. At least all we can see how current market looks like. Battery was good enough in previous, the energy consumption was awful and problematic, I also doubt that ~5% of extra capacity makes real difference. IMO will be nice to see more generic battery in future models, but it’s a separate topic.
