FP7 Future Fairphone tech

Discuss The Products
21

After using FP4 for s few years and apart from the lacking software support.
A brighter screen is most wanted. It is very hard to use outside in bright sunlight. As an outdoors person it’s a problem.
More energy efficient chips and improved battery, are a high priority.

SD-card, large emedded storage, repairablity, relockable bootloader.

If I would make a wishlish of features it would be slighly smaller (atleast screensize) than most phones and focused on power efficancy over processing power and to be able to install GrapheneOS. Satellite functionality also be nice.

5 Likes
22

some decent CPU / APU, so that the phone can provide enough power for more complex tasks when connected to the external monitor and other peripherals.

23

I’m generally surprised that no one seems to have raised the wish to have an e-ink screen, or be able to change to an e-ink screen instead of the normal LCD screen.

A brighter screen is most wanted. It is very hard to use outside in bright sunlight. As an outdoors person it’s a problem.

That would definitely solve for issues such as the one above and it would give the phone longer battery time to boot. I do believe that there is an overlapping interest of people wanting to use fairphone and also wanting to limit the addictiveness of phones which an e-ink screen would also largely help with.

I have myself sent an email to give this as feedback a while back. Would be pleasantly surprised if they actually took this feedback on board, but we’ll see.

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24

E-Ink is monochrome still, isn’t it?

25

No, there are color variants available, but they still look quite pale.

26

We don’t even know what the FP6 will bring, maybe a wishlist for the FP7 now is a bit too much? It would be released in a few years anyway, if at all. The technology would be different at that point and thus also that wishlist.

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27

Yeah, e-ink is mostly monochrome. But tbh, unless you are playing games it’s mostly enough to do what you need to do on a phone imho.

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28

The other topics related to FP6 this got closed by mods and you eventually get redirected here :slight_smile:

29

Watching movies and series on q smartphone is very common now so I don’t think an e-ink screen is sufficient for a smartphone. And I imagine people taking a photo and looking at the results immediately after on their phone.

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30

It sounds futuristic but if the display was easily swappable (like the battery is) it could work.

I am following the threads on eink and ereaders and small ereaders/minimal phones pop up quite often.

But I don’t think there is enough potential for FP to be a only eink phone. Most people would not choose that.

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31

I agree that most people won’t choose it. But since a screen is in fact replaceable today it’s certainly possible to replace the screen with another screen, and that other screen could be an e-ink screen if fairphone had one that fit.

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32

Fair, but keep in mind that the modular design of Fairphone is mainly intended to replace broken parts easily and not to increase the need for new materials and the potential amount of e-waste.

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33

I’d like them to make a module for a headphone jack, with the possibility of upgrading the DAC in it.

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34

Eink is cool. I would prefer it but, it just ain’t good for taking photos.
A flip phone with an internal OLED and a external e-ink display would be awesome.

35

It seems few people heard about the yotaphones https://m.gsmarena.com/yota-phones-99.php

As you can see the phone maker tried several iterations but without success.

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36

Bigme makes e-ink smartphones (b&w) still to this day. (Only issue with it is the keyboard/os rarely lagging behind what you type but that happened to me with the FP5 too)

37

It also needs a lot more programming etc to make all other components work with different screens, so its not just adding differnt hardware and thats it.

Shiftphones wanted to do this for the Shift8 with OLED and LCD not sure they finally did it, I think it wasnt worth the effort, so its not available.

Overall I think the voices for e-ink are as old as the forum wish lists, and I dont believe it makes much sense to create a niche product for a niche product.

5 Likes
38

Good points! I already got a bit annoyed by the low brightness in some outdoor situations on the FP5 for example (thinking of it, maybe my fault with dark mode)
But if fairphone sold a separate e-ink screen, I would absolutely buy it to retro-fit it, even monochrome, at least to try.

And too bad for photos, I take too many anyway; more seriously, it probably wouldn’t be very hard to adapt a camera app to have a still frame every 2s updating preview or something.
Thinking of it, Open Camera already has an “optimize focus for quality” option, we wouldn’t even need to see much and just trust the photo is good most of the time.

But yeah, I get the niche in niche arguments…

E-ink Screen for Fairphone 4 or future versions
39

Another bump to this old thread. I would also love to see this, maybe as a separate item in the Fairphone store I can order and just switch the screen on my own.

I think e-ink screens (preferably with backlight) are easier to read for my eyes, so having this would be highly beneficial for me. I also rather not just buy a new phone, there’s nothing wrong with my FP5. But having e-ink screen as an “addon” would be amazing.

1 Like
E-ink Screen for Fairphone 4 or future versions
40

Hi there
I wanted to renew my FP3, buying the FP5 however I’ve read that there’s no possibility to use 2 sims in the FP5. I think this is a great inconvenient and a big change in the design of the FP, since the beginning of the aventure.
Can you tell me if the next FP6 will go back to this great usefull and ecological feature?
Thanks