I agree that Android 6 or 7 currently isn’t the point where we should decide if the phone is outdated or not. The hardware is still totally fine for everyday use, too. What I see as a problem is that if you buy a FP2 today you already lost about 2.5 years of potential support by the company, so chances are lower for keeping it as long as possible in case hardware components fail. According to the life cycle assessment of the FP2 it looks like they consider a 5-year “repair” scenario, which I assume is a lifespan of 5 years including a few repairs. Together with a price that is still the same as when it was released (which is probably because there has never been a big profit margin on it, so I do understand it) it is hard to recommend it today except for the idealistic reasons - unfortunately.
This is a community forum. If you have a question for the company, you’ll have to contact them.
Come on, he obviously knows that.
Still there are some FP employees regularly active on this forum.
So there is nothing wrong with trying to get in touch with them or “using” them to raise awareness for something with the company FP, that is still small enough to consider this a realistic way. And answering to a posting results in a notification, that someone has answered. If that answer is moved, it’s kind of breaking the chain, and you have to be curious to follow the moved posting.
@demetrio
You can try to address FP employees the way I am doing right now with you; just add the name with an “@” as prefix and this person will be notified. Obviously you then should at least add an explanation, why you “invited” this person, like “I think you at FP should know about this issue” or the like.
And you can, of course, always try to contact someone using the pm-function of this board.
How successful any of this is, I have no idea, as I do not work with FP.
That was obvious, but as was said before me, they do answer sometimes directly on the forum. This was what i was trying to reach.
Fortunately you and some others, do not understand anything rather than “wow FP is sooo great”. It is like a fan-forum of Apple. Nothing more nothing less.
Since is like talking with a wall, I leave you with your blind happiness. Farewell.
Can we please com back to an objective conversation?
Thank you.
Experience tells us that the community steps in when the company fails to provide spare parts.
And to improve these circumstances, I talked on my visit in Amsterdam with @Monica.Ciovica about repairing the peripheral modules. This would be also a community effort to tighten meshes in the net to secure the spare part availability.
One thing about the specs:
- Higher pixels density than iPhone XR (324ppi vs. 441 ppi)
- No notch!
If that’s not top-notch than I don’t know! 
The key word here is
.
It is very obvious that this is a community Forum, so of course you’ll get answers from the community, and not from employees at FP, since they aren’t regularly active here.
To explain some of your points:
One advantage of the FP2 is that you don’t necessarily rely on the shipped OS. You can simply install e.g. LineageOS, which is already on Adnroid 8 and Android 9 is in development by the community.
Android 7 isn’t outdated, it’s still supported by Google and receives security pachtes regularly, which are also going to be brought to the FP2’s, which is btw something that most other phone manufacturers don’t do, just to clarify.
Those people will very likely NEVER buy a FP, because it is more expensive than other phones (because of eg. higher wages) and a thicker form factor (modularity). Moreover the company goal of Fairphone is NOT to get everyone to buy a FP, but to show other companies that fair(er) phones are possible and to get them to produce in an equal way.
Finally,
this is just an example of your inability to have a civilised conversation. We are all different people with different opinions, and of course you are allowed to be sceptical, but be polite. In case you didn’t notice, you are the only person in this topic who is constantly insulting people. It’s no surprise that no one is willing to give you an answer if you are not willing to ask your questions without being totally unfriendly.
Oh, and by the way,
don’t conclude from yourself to others.
The interesting question would be: what are users missing if they are not at the highest major version?
I have to admit I like the fact that in Android 8 more icons can be placed on the home screen by default (of course, one could install a different launcher in 7 to get the same effect). But to be honest, that was the only major change I noticed 
Personally I’d be most interested in battery life. From 6 to 7 there are improvements to be expected. But between 7 and 8 I noticed no change whatsoever.
First of all: Android 7 is still not out yet.
First: What do you expect from a community forum? It is either made by critics, that are complaining about a bad product (as they see it) or by fans/supporters. The difference with this Fairphone Forum is, that the users always try to help, giving hints and tips and even offering direct help and support through the fairphoneangels program.
Maybe that’s the reason, this thread has turned a bit dissonant (from my point of view).
You @demetrio wanted to express your frustration and reach someone from FP (if possible), maybe finding some understanding and equally disappointed company, Or do I get this wrong?
The majority of forum-users answering to your posting are Fairphone Angels (discernible by the little angel-logo by the user logo), set in help mode by definition. They of course are idealistic fairphone supporters, as they not only maintain this forum for free, they do the same with “their heavens”. While seeing and accepting flaws of the phone and the concept, the general mindset of angels is to not stop there, but to help overcome any obstacles and to help everyone getting his/her faulty phone working. (My guessing/perception only of course.)
As you were not looking for help, this was meant to result in a kind of “clash” by moving along differerent lines of reasoning, leading to frustration on both sides.
Maybe we as regulars on the forum should learn to accept, that not everyone want’s support and help, but simply make a statement .
And if someone is dissatisfied and frustrated by the FP, it might be best sometimes, to leave it there, accept it and maybe offer some sympathy and understanding. At least I have read some stories on this forum, that made me wonder, how the users managed to stay patient for a long time, while I did not wonder at all, that they finally lost all their faith and were not interested in support anymore.
(Btw: To me personally, the OS-version is of no importance. Even my old FP1 with Android 4.2 does the trick. An improvement in battery-handling might be a good thing, but I could not care less, if it is 9, 8, 7 or 6.)
From where someone knows so precisely about that…
I closed this temporarily to give everyone time to cool down. This discussion is not going anywhere at the moment.
This topic was automatically opened after 3 days.
I totally agree with this post. I don’t think anyone really listed the reasons the fairphone needs a SoC upgrade.
The Snapdragon 801 is laughably old at this point in time - there should be a refresh bringing in either the 450 or the 636.
Both of these are high grade commodity processors that wipe the floor with the 801 in several ways.
Manufacturing process means it’s up to 80% more power efficient than the 801.
The 801 uses A7 cores, we’re 3 generation past that technology alone in the 636, using A73 cores.
These cores are up to 8x faster per mHZ, you don’t need a 2.2 GHz processor eating your battery life, you can have a 1.8Ghz sipper.
LTE Radio - reduce power consumption, get better throughput in locations, support for more bands, better connectivity to carriers with aggregation technology. Safer better phone for calls where you are.
WiFi radio - latest mimo technology and range aggregation, now comes on commodity budget processors. This is less of an issue, but much bigger convenience factor. Multiple uses for wifi. Better to have the latest stable radio you can have.
Charging technology. If you haven’t tried quick charge 4 you are missing out. A full days battery in about 15 minutes. - that convenience alone makes for a phone that’s safe and accessible.
Camera - You know what’s better than a camera module upgrade? How about some Image Signal Processors that are modern.
NFC - not a fad, in a world where all of our information is consistently stolen and sold, protect your self when using credit cards through tolken based technology that doesn’t share your cards. This should be default now, it’s made its way into $200 budget phones.
I could go on and on and on about everything that the fp2 isn’t going to do as well as a $300 phone being sold today.
Lots of us want to join this community ride of fairness, and long use - but at this point in time there’s so many missing features for the cost, it’d be hard to sell.
And no, I’m not a phone every year guy. I use a phone until it breaks, and I can justify the cost too repair ratio.
I’m afraid that’s false. The Snapdragon 801 has Qualcomm’s own Krait (400) CPUs. They do 3.39DMIPS/MHz, putting them in terms of performance in line with Cortex A15, not A7. Perhaps you meant to talk about ARMs (32-bit) v7 architecture, under which both the Cortex A7 and A15 fall?
Other than that, I sympathise completely with the “SoC is outdated” story, but not necessarily for the individual features that you point out. I’d only have one simple reason:
I’d go one step further and say that the Fairphone in terms of specs is about on par with the Wileyfox Swift 2x, which you can pick up for €170. When I bought the FP2, a phone with similar specs would have cost me about €350-400. This means that when I made a decision to purchase a new phone, I paid a +40% mark-up for fairness. Due to market changes, FP today is asking for a +200% mark-up to stand for these values. That’s quite a different thing to ask from customers…
Don’t get me wrong, I am quite satisfied with my purchase 2,5 years ago, and I hope it’ll last me another 2,5. But if today my FP2 fell off a cliff I would find it incredibly hard to justify getting a new FP2.
And here’s the troublesome situation Fairphone is currently in. I’d say if the FP2 today was on sale for €350, it would be a reasonable deal. However, there’s no opportunity for them to make up for the difference in price at such a level because they rely on now unsupported/discontinued components. Qualcomm doesn’t produce these 801’s at bulk anymore, so there’s just nothing to win from supply chain efficiency gains. And you don’t want to deteriorate workers’ conditions either.
The other option is to add value to justify a retail price of €529 again. Newer better SoCs can probably be purchased for the same price as the 801 so that sounds like an easy plan, but the challenges involved there both on the hardware as on the software side essentially mean releasing a new phone. As long as Fairphone considers releasing a new phone a breach of their “5 year lifespan” value (why? I for one won’t upgrade straight away, this phone can still fulfils my needs for the next year or so when Android 7 makes it), they’ll have a hard time selling.
My bad, you’re right, they are A15 CPUs, still 3 generations behind current SoCs, but yes thanks for pointing out that I referenced the wrong base core! I should have expanded but really mean we’re at a point where quad A73 cores are the base standard in 2018.
Maybe you should follow and support this community project:
As it is typical in fad industries, you give lots of examples of solutions in search of problems.
Let me give you another perspective: my family’s two Fairphone 2 still work great after one year and a half. They function as expected and fulfill all our needs while protecting our privacy and allowing me to fix them easily when necessary, both hardware and software. And, above all, they offer solutions to real problems in an industry filled up with utterly unsustainable business models and consumer attitudes.
Or as the saying goes, “the fool looks at the finger that points at the sky” 
Be careful with this argument 
. I tend to agree mostly that a lot of the stuff offered by newer SoCs are “nice to have” rather than “must have” features, of the whole list posted by @Dmikey I really only care about battery life (which is why I feel impatient about the Android 7 upgrade, but that’s for a different forum thread ). However, I’m not entitled to judge about other people’s requirements.
Which is why I prefer to look at the “value for money” offered by FP2. Value might be something personal, but we can express it in money by analysing the rest of the market. As I said in a previous post, an “unfair” FP2-equivalent would today cost less than €200, where at time of release this was around €350. That changes the decision made by consumers who have to find a balance in their life between product satisfaction, fairness and their own bank account.