First of all, congratulations to the FP developers for all the things you have accomplished and to the buyers who keep supporting these initiatives.
I was thinking on buying my father a FP2, he has been a great help to me all my life and I wanted to get him a gift of appreciation. He is very much into ethical standards in today’s economy so I think that FP suits him just fine in this area, however I had some questions about the phone itself. Maybe someone might be able to answer:
My father is not very good with technology, he has been using an iPhone until now because he considers it easy. A modular phone and a new operating system could be difficult for him to grasp. Do FP2 work like any other Android phone? I heard that the operating system is quite old (5.1), is this true? Will it be upgraded to support other OS or this cannot be changed?
I read some places that say that the camera is not very good, that is one of the little things that my father uses, has anyone found any trouble with this?
Is there any risk of the phone being outdated soon in terms of support? I imagine FP team is not very big, and we live in Spain so I understand there are no stores to go to for help. If the FP3 comes out, I understand that there will continue to be support for FP2 buyers right? I know that the idea of it being a modular phone should not worry on this area but for someone who uses the phone not so much and who will probably change little parts over the years I wanted to know the risk of this.
##about android version :
Lollipop 5.1 was released in March 2015, which might be considered “old” if you want the top-ultimate-latest thing. But in the real world, it is still the most used version today :
As of September 2016, Android Lollipop (5.0 – 5.1) is the single most widely used Android version, operating on 35.0% of all Android devices accessing Google Play. The second is Android KitKat (4.4), with a share of 27.7%.
(source Android version history - Wikipedia)
Marshmallow is slowly growing, and Nougat will be officially released in december 2016.
###For the camera :
It is very subjective, but also the FP2 doesnt have the top-ultimate highest end camera. You can make your own opinion there :
About support :
Well, to my own experience, stores are totally USELESS. They are sellers. They don’t know anything about repairing a phone, they will be here to tell you that you need another new phone. That is my personal opinion only. You get better support by asking the community here on the forum. And other brands do not offer such a forum.
First of all thanks for the suggestions. Everything you say is pretty clear, in my opinion de camera should not be a problem for him, and I agree about the stores not being useful, I have had my quarrels before.
The OS is what concerns me most, but I am not good with phones so I would not know how this works. So my question would be: will Marshmallow and Nougat be usable on FP2 or once the model is produced it cannot run in future versions of the OS?
Android is not ‘universal’ like windows or linux, it has to be adapted specifically to each single phone. Which means that having future updates depend on the good will of the manufacturer OR the efforts of the community, but this cannot be predicted.
As an example, i could update my HTC from 2.3 to 4.4 thanks to the cyanogenmod community, looong after the company abandoned my model.
You a pointing a quite important part of the planned obsolescence problem with phones. You can take a 10-year old PC and still install the latest linux on it. This is something you can’t do in the android world. They push you into buying new devices every year.
But, might I ask, do you have a reason to need marshmallow or nougat ?
And, imagine you buy the top-ultimate phone for christmas, with super shiny android 10. Then, nothing at all can assure you that you will be able to update it to android 11 in one year !!
You might have a look into this topic, especially the last post. To sum things up: The FP2 will get a major upgrade to Marshmallow (Android 6) or Nougat (Android 7). Fairphone is still investigating which version they will (= are able to) go for.
Thanks that was enriching. I do not have any concrete reason to want Marshmallow or Nougat, I was just worried that if I did an important investment on the phone that it could still be used 1 or 2 years after its purchase. I see now that this is a problem for all the phones that are not linux or windows as you say.
Don’t worry, even with an older version, your phone will not be ‘unusable’. Some apps can become unavailable for older versions, but this is not so common. Look at the graphic on the wikipedia page i linked to, many people still use 4.4, so if developpers want their apps to be used, they have to take it into account.
Even, newer OS can require more CPU / memory and make you phone slower.