"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled."
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
The Graphene devs can be a bit obsessive about security, but with a starting price above $600, I think the average user is probably better off with a Pixel 10a bought on sale closer to $300. The stock Fairphone OS seems to include Google services, which is kind of surprising and at odds with the focus on user control and all that.
Fairphone also had the publicly available test key flagged as trusted by the boot loader at one point, which probably discourages projects like GOS, since it makes it harder to trust the hardware to not be a weak link in security.
One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.
Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
The sloppiness in the AI comes from the human sloppiness on this topic. This seems like a variant of what I've seen called the "fake because", which is the idea that people don't generally analyze whether or not a given reason actually makes sense. For example, the common advertising "You need to buy this beer because it'll get you the girls". It is obvious to conscious examination by pretty much everyone that this is obviously false... the problem is getting it up to that conscious examination in the first place.
I've also noticed several times the deployment of "It's not about the X, {because} it's actually about the Y" where the connection between the X and the Y has no real logic in it upon examination. That can often be translated to "I want to change the topic to Y" without much loss. I think this is one of the primary ways that AI writing can be really exhausting to work through logically and it gets people who are for whatever reason thinking sloppily, including just the sheer exhaustion of the amount of thinking navigating the modern world takes even for someone who nominally understands how to penetrate this sort of sloppy thinking, into so much trouble when they just trust the torrent of words going by. AIs can very easily hallucinate "fake becauses" at a rate no human could possibly keep up with.
I agree that it's marketing mumbo jumbo, but it's saying "we haven't added more features because more is better, we added them because they actually improve the longevity of the product."
If anything, that sentence tells me that they are insecure of their features being perceived as bullshit.
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
This has it backwards, it is the AI that writes like cliched AD copy. Feast your eyes on this quote from a whiskey CEO, supposedly written in 2016:
> ‘When you bring people in from overseas [to Scotland], you’re working on their mindsets,’ he says. ‘You make them get a feeling for Scotch. It’s not about an advert, it’s about this magical industry with its rich heritage and this history.
> ‘It’s not about kilts and drums, but it’s about the Highlands, the water, the peat, the stories, and I call it softness – it’s very gentle marketing. A lot of what you’ve got to do is to win the hearts and minds.’
This is something that frustrates me a lot when I see people jumping on a piece of writing as AI generated, these AI-isms didn't show up in a vacuum. Yes, AI commonly overuses some patterns, but it got those patterns from it's training data because real people wrote (and continue to write) that way. A few matching sentences here or there is not the smoking gun people make it out to be.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
I mean, AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set. Honestly AI producing it so much is much more likely to make humans avoid it.
Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.
How have the Fairbuds XL been for you? Have you used any other similar headphones before Fairbuds (asking for your comparison).
I love my Airpod Maxes but I have spend way too much money and time keeping this thing maintained. Once it finally kicks the can, I really want to try something more repair friendly.
Yeah, but only the Fairphone 4 (which is very dated at this point), and only from Murena which is a can of worms in itself. Support also ranges from non-existent to atrocious.
IIRC costs and/or size. I agree, silly change. Going from the blue to green theme is another silly change, as is renaming scheme. I like many things this company does, but some decisions I question.
I also bet a smaller, less powerful smartphone with 3.5 mm would sell like hot cakes.
How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder!
I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways
You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first.
DisplayPort Alt-Mode is important for when you smash your phone but you _need_ to access data that is on it. Maybe its your photos, text messages, or access to a banking app. Without DP Alt-Mode you're going to be waiting for a screen replacement to ship, with DP Alt-Mode you're just plugging your phone into your dock like a laptop.
Personally I would have seriously considered this phone if it wasn't for the lack of DP Alt-Mode. It would be a tiny portable Linux computer with an unlimited internet connection available anywhere. It would be the perfect thin-client. My cellular plan limits my tethered bandwidth so using the phone as my computer rather than as my computer's modem has real benefits.
When we are travelling, we often hook up our phones to a hotel/apartment TV with a DP-Alt to HDMI adapter to use our own streaming services/apps. A phone without DP-Alt would be a no-go.
Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.
I currently travel between two office locations, with identical setup (screen, dock, mouse and keyboard, ...) so i just close the laptop lid and plug in the office's type C cable coming from the screen.
Sometimes i bring along my laptop so i keep my work laptop where it's at and RDP into it from the other location (laptop just plugs into the type C cable).
Nothing really special, but it's really nice.
Then, back when google enabled desktop mode on most pixels, i of course tried it. Neat, but it's just a shittier gnome desktop with very few desktop apps. If it was a full fledged windows phone with a KDE-Touch interface that rendered a full desktop when docked, oh boy wouldn't it be neat?
Another thing to consider: For some goddamn reason i have a couple of samsung flaships that will refuse to talk to ADB if i use a 2.0 Cable. Has to be 3.0 or type C <-> Type C
You need to transfer more than 480Mbps over a hard line to and from your phone? Seems like a niche requirement that even iPhone 17 doesn't bother with. Or is it psychological 'nunber must go up and usb number went from 2 to 3 many years ago so now 2 bad'
Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.
A friend had the Fair Phone 4. It broke after a year. Hostile customer support, not worth her time. Idk. Stories of "good guy" indie companies who drop you as soon as you fell for their marketing keep piling up. It may be greed, short sightedness or an incompetent understanding of what it means to have customers, the results are the same. See Framework for another example of this.
Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money).
Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.
My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
It's a ten dollar dongle that can stay attached to your audio cable out of the way when not using it and has no perceptible affect on sound quality, and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge, so the whole no-audio-jack thing is a moot point nowadays. It's a solved problem for years now.
Using a dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio, which I do all the time. I also frequently interchange my wired earbuds between my phone and laptop, and don't want to be bothered with an extra loose dongle when I disconnect the earbuds.
Sorry, this isn't a solved problem at all, apart from the solution of only buying phones that have audio jacks.
It's also extremely expensive. I'm more interested on seeing the next iteration of the PinePhone to fulfill the full Linux phone dream. In the meantime, commodity Android phones are still good enough.
Praying that fairphone somehow makes a foldable one day. My next phone will probably be a fold 8 because I really want a nice reading experience on the go, but I love the philosophy and love my framework laptop.
Considering the big players with R&D budgets valued in the billions have been struggling to make foldable phones, I can't imagine a niche player making one.
Fairphone as a whole feels like a company that prioritises the mission, but only this mission of ethical and reusable hardware. The user experience for power users who are most likely to recommend their devices feels like a let-down.
I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.
Unfortunately, there were quite a lot early reports of users whose FP6 volume buttons broke or their logic boards during charging. Both are components that are not user-replaceable and it often takes Fairphone 4-6 weeks to repair them. Similarly, the head band on their FairBuds XL regularly break for a bunch of people (user replaceable, but you still have to go through their slow support if you do not want to pay for the replacement yourself).
Fairphone (in contrast to Apple) are also known for introducing really bad bugs and then not fixing them for months. Like how the FP4 could only keep a single app in memory after they introduced a memory management bug or how currently a lot of FP6 users are affected by a bug where WiFi stops working (due to an IPv6-related bug) that has been reported in March.
Then there are the really weird design decisions on the FP6. Like, they put the fingerprint scanner in the power button, which makes it nearly impossible to use it one-handed with your left hand if you actually want to unlock it or use fingerprint unlock in an application. And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
And then we haven't talked about the hardware. The speakers are pretty mediocre. The camera is only mid. The SoC even caused render slowdowns in 2026 in /e/OS, it's going to be wholly underpowered after 7 years (the new CPU in the plus is barely going to help, the 7s Gen 4 is the Gen 3 with slightly higher clocked cores).
I had the Fairphone 6 and I am happy that I was able to get rid of it for still a fairly OK price (I got it because I like their mission).
I mean replacing a battery is something you do, at most, once every 5-7 years. If removing the battery requires a heat gun then it's not the worst thing imo.
> Critical Notice: The device does not support LTE Band 13 (Verizon's primary coverage frequency).
Presumably that frequency isn't used in Europe? It also says that it's "not certified for use on the Verizon Wireless network." I don't know if that means Verizon might block it (which sounds like a very US thing) or it's related to not supporting the frequency that Verizon uses for LTE.
That's been true for much of the history of cellular networks, as far as I know - universal standards in Europe, US phones can't (always) be moved between service providers. It used to be even worse in the US, with phones locked to individual carriers regardless of technology.
That's some of the European over-regulation that everyone complains about, compared to unfettered American competition.
Why use Verizon directly? It's insanely overpriced. US mobile and others provide better prices, service, features, security, and customer service. If it doesn't work on their towers, US mobile allows you to switch to at&t and t mobile towers.
Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m seriously thinking about switching to AT&T over this, but I would need to know if the frequencies are covered as good on AT&T.
I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
How are you going to innovate installing hundreds of thousands of cell towers across the USA?
Mobile network via satellite might increase number of network providers by 1 or 2, but the physics problem of needing tons of physical assets to create a wireless network usable by small, low powered devices remains.
I guess you could innovate some new physics that allows you to send wireless signals through more surfaces, that is also not ionizing radiation to animal and plant tissue, and doesn’t need a lot of power to send from a mobile device. That is a lot to ask, though.
> I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
The beginning of your sentence - "I can’t believe how few choices we have..." - can be applied equally sadly to other areas here in the U.S....such as but not limited to lack of choice of residential ISPs, or lack of choice (or generally mis-incentivized) healthcare providers, or lack of choice of mobile service providers, or, etc., or etc. And, of course, your last part of your comment asking where the innovation is? Well, innovation often is pocketed in those who control the capital, and only released little by little at the whims of releasing more capital. Sorry, i have to step away, cuz felt sad instantly just citing my own comments here. :-(
I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.
"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled."
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features:
> Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us.
I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.
18 replies →
The Graphene devs can be a bit obsessive about security, but with a starting price above $600, I think the average user is probably better off with a Pixel 10a bought on sale closer to $300. The stock Fairphone OS seems to include Google services, which is kind of surprising and at odds with the focus on user control and all that.
Here's a post with more specific allegations:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
i dont get it, they are comparing eOS to graphene, not talking about the hardware.
this would be like grapheneOS not using pixel because the stock android that ships with it does not respect privacy.
am i missing something?
You still need to rely on the OEM to properly configure the bootloader, not leak the keys, and provide updated vendor blobs.
1 reply →
Fairphone also had the publicly available test key flagged as trusted by the boot loader at one point, which probably discourages projects like GOS, since it makes it harder to trust the hardware to not be a weak link in security.
One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.
Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
AI-like typing detected.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
The sloppiness in the AI comes from the human sloppiness on this topic. This seems like a variant of what I've seen called the "fake because", which is the idea that people don't generally analyze whether or not a given reason actually makes sense. For example, the common advertising "You need to buy this beer because it'll get you the girls". It is obvious to conscious examination by pretty much everyone that this is obviously false... the problem is getting it up to that conscious examination in the first place.
I've also noticed several times the deployment of "It's not about the X, {because} it's actually about the Y" where the connection between the X and the Y has no real logic in it upon examination. That can often be translated to "I want to change the topic to Y" without much loss. I think this is one of the primary ways that AI writing can be really exhausting to work through logically and it gets people who are for whatever reason thinking sloppily, including just the sheer exhaustion of the amount of thinking navigating the modern world takes even for someone who nominally understands how to penetrate this sort of sloppy thinking, into so much trouble when they just trust the torrent of words going by. AIs can very easily hallucinate "fake becauses" at a rate no human could possibly keep up with.
I agree that it's marketing mumbo jumbo, but it's saying "we haven't added more features because more is better, we added them because they actually improve the longevity of the product."
If anything, that sentence tells me that they are insecure of their features being perceived as bullshit.
2 replies →
The root problem is that all marketing copy is like this, generated by meat sacks or weight arrays. It’s all borderline nonsense.
>how do people copy edit this and not notice?
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
5 replies →
Right? As opposed to all those unintentional improvements they usually put in their products.
how do people copy edit this and not notice?
If they wanted to pay trained copy editors, they wouldn't use A.I.
3 replies →
it sounds profound to the person that generated it
level 1 AI psychosis, really mild symptoms
1 reply →
This has it backwards, it is the AI that writes like cliched AD copy. Feast your eyes on this quote from a whiskey CEO, supposedly written in 2016:
> ‘When you bring people in from overseas [to Scotland], you’re working on their mindsets,’ he says. ‘You make them get a feeling for Scotch. It’s not about an advert, it’s about this magical industry with its rich heritage and this history.
> ‘It’s not about kilts and drums, but it’s about the Highlands, the water, the peat, the stories, and I call it softness – it’s very gentle marketing. A lot of what you’ve got to do is to win the hearts and minds.’
The waybackmachine has it first in 2019, but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit. https://web.archive.org/web/20190823030911/https://scotchwhi...
This is something that frustrates me a lot when I see people jumping on a piece of writing as AI generated, these AI-isms didn't show up in a vacuum. Yes, AI commonly overuses some patterns, but it got those patterns from it's training data because real people wrote (and continue to write) that way. A few matching sentences here or there is not the smoking gun people make it out to be.
4 replies →
> but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit
It's also lacking the toaster dash. Clear bio-signature of the unaffected hearts and minds.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
I mean, AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set. Honestly AI producing it so much is much more likely to make humans avoid it.
1 reply →
I’m not. I’m tired of trying to parse this crap.
Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.
The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…
To which device are you referring?
The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs.
https://us.fairphone.com/carrier-compatibility
1 reply →
Exciting to see this soon after someone got the Fairphone 6 camera working on postmarketOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285
The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.
They even mention that they want to move on to work on the Fairphone 6+.
Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone.
I bought a Fairphone 4 from Murena years ago (and am still using it), and I bought a pair of Fairbuds XL just in April from the same.
How have the Fairbuds XL been for you? Have you used any other similar headphones before Fairbuds (asking for your comparison).
I love my Airpod Maxes but I have spend way too much money and time keeping this thing maintained. Once it finally kicks the can, I really want to try something more repair friendly.
This is still a big deal and seems to come with more expanded carrier support.
Yeah, but only the Fairphone 4 (which is very dated at this point), and only from Murena which is a can of worms in itself. Support also ranges from non-existent to atrocious.
Directly buying from FP is a huge deal for me.
USB 2.0 port is the only thing preventing me from purchasing one. A wild choice since I believe previous versions did not have this limitation.
I wonder what their reasoning behind the downgrade is. I own a FP4 and even this model features USB 3.0 with DisplayPort support.
IIRC costs and/or size. I agree, silly change. Going from the blue to green theme is another silly change, as is renaming scheme. I like many things this company does, but some decisions I question.
I also bet a smaller, less powerful smartphone with 3.5 mm would sell like hot cakes.
How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder!
I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways
You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
7 replies →
DisplayPort Alt-Mode is important for when you smash your phone but you _need_ to access data that is on it. Maybe its your photos, text messages, or access to a banking app. Without DP Alt-Mode you're going to be waiting for a screen replacement to ship, with DP Alt-Mode you're just plugging your phone into your dock like a laptop.
Personally I would have seriously considered this phone if it wasn't for the lack of DP Alt-Mode. It would be a tiny portable Linux computer with an unlimited internet connection available anywhere. It would be the perfect thin-client. My cellular plan limits my tethered bandwidth so using the phone as my computer rather than as my computer's modem has real benefits.
1 reply →
When we are travelling, we often hook up our phones to a hotel/apartment TV with a DP-Alt to HDMI adapter to use our own streaming services/apps. A phone without DP-Alt would be a no-go.
Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.
5 replies →
Honestly, if it was a linux phone...
I currently travel between two office locations, with identical setup (screen, dock, mouse and keyboard, ...) so i just close the laptop lid and plug in the office's type C cable coming from the screen.
Sometimes i bring along my laptop so i keep my work laptop where it's at and RDP into it from the other location (laptop just plugs into the type C cable).
Nothing really special, but it's really nice.
Then, back when google enabled desktop mode on most pixels, i of course tried it. Neat, but it's just a shittier gnome desktop with very few desktop apps. If it was a full fledged windows phone with a KDE-Touch interface that rendered a full desktop when docked, oh boy wouldn't it be neat?
Another thing to consider: For some goddamn reason i have a couple of samsung flaships that will refuse to talk to ADB if i use a 2.0 Cable. Has to be 3.0 or type C <-> Type C
You need to transfer more than 480Mbps over a hard line to and from your phone? Seems like a niche requirement that even iPhone 17 doesn't bother with. Or is it psychological 'nunber must go up and usb number went from 2 to 3 many years ago so now 2 bad'
Even my lgv20 could do an external display.
Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.
3 replies →
A friend had the Fair Phone 4. It broke after a year. Hostile customer support, not worth her time. Idk. Stories of "good guy" indie companies who drop you as soon as you fell for their marketing keep piling up. It may be greed, short sightedness or an incompetent understanding of what it means to have customers, the results are the same. See Framework for another example of this.
Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money).
Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.
My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
No standard audio jack?
That's a dealbreaker for me, especially for something touting modularity, repairability, and user control.
It's a ten dollar dongle that can stay attached to your audio cable out of the way when not using it and has no perceptible affect on sound quality, and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge, so the whole no-audio-jack thing is a moot point nowadays. It's a solved problem for years now.
Using a dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio, which I do all the time. I also frequently interchange my wired earbuds between my phone and laptop, and don't want to be bothered with an extra loose dongle when I disconnect the earbuds.
Sorry, this isn't a solved problem at all, apart from the solution of only buying phones that have audio jacks.
3 replies →
I'm not saying they're related, but they also make and sell wireless headphones...
In this case, you may be interested in Librem 5, although the hardware is weaker.
'You may be interested in this $800 product.'
'I'm not interested.'
'Here's why you should be.'
What you call activism, others call shilling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324418
4 replies →
It's also extremely expensive. I'm more interested on seeing the next iteration of the PinePhone to fulfill the full Linux phone dream. In the meantime, commodity Android phones are still good enough.
9 replies →
Praying that fairphone somehow makes a foldable one day. My next phone will probably be a fold 8 because I really want a nice reading experience on the go, but I love the philosophy and love my framework laptop.
Considering the big players with R&D budgets valued in the billions have been struggling to make foldable phones, I can't imagine a niche player making one.
My gripe is the lack of usb 3 / dp-alt support.
Fairphone as a whole feels like a company that prioritises the mission, but only this mission of ethical and reusable hardware. The user experience for power users who are most likely to recommend their devices feels like a let-down.
Can someone explain why in 2026 we have artificial limits like this?
> expandable upto 2TB with microSD
I get that 2TB ought to be enough for everybody, but why the heck shouldn't a 4TB microSD Just Work?
The SDXC spec does not allow for cards bigger than 2TiB, because of address sizes. You need SDUC for above 4TB.
They just haven't tested anything larger.
Every time I've seen a card capacity limit like this, someone tries a bigger card and it just... works.
How is the OS?
That website took a very very long time to load.
Disappointed they don't have a wireless-charging-enabled backplate. And I was just about ready to pull the trigger...
I know wireless charging is wasteful... but I've got magsafe pucks everywhere in the house/car now... Let me have this one thing...
Will it work in Canada?
$650 for anyone who does not want to click. Hard sell compared to the iPhone 17e but more choice is good.
I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.
Unfortunately, there were quite a lot early reports of users whose FP6 volume buttons broke or their logic boards during charging. Both are components that are not user-replaceable and it often takes Fairphone 4-6 weeks to repair them. Similarly, the head band on their FairBuds XL regularly break for a bunch of people (user replaceable, but you still have to go through their slow support if you do not want to pay for the replacement yourself).
Fairphone (in contrast to Apple) are also known for introducing really bad bugs and then not fixing them for months. Like how the FP4 could only keep a single app in memory after they introduced a memory management bug or how currently a lot of FP6 users are affected by a bug where WiFi stops working (due to an IPv6-related bug) that has been reported in March.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/dns-over-tls-ipv6-issues-apps-...
Then there are the really weird design decisions on the FP6. Like, they put the fingerprint scanner in the power button, which makes it nearly impossible to use it one-handed with your left hand if you actually want to unlock it or use fingerprint unlock in an application. And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
And then we haven't talked about the hardware. The speakers are pretty mediocre. The camera is only mid. The SoC even caused render slowdowns in 2026 in /e/OS, it's going to be wholly underpowered after 7 years (the new CPU in the plus is barely going to help, the 7s Gen 4 is the Gen 3 with slightly higher clocked cores).
I had the Fairphone 6 and I am happy that I was able to get rid of it for still a fairly OK price (I got it because I like their mission).
7 replies →
I’d pay twice what they are asking for one with a reasonably sized screen.
I’m holding on to my iphone mini, but apparently people buy the razr and just leave it closed 100% of the time.
That’s $700, and not having the dumb hinge mechanism and internal facing display would be a selling point for many.
I mean replacing a battery is something you do, at most, once every 5-7 years. If removing the battery requires a heat gun then it's not the worst thing imo.
1 reply →
Wondering if fairphone will ever be officially available in india. I would like a no bloatware and repairable device.
No Verizon support. :(
How is that still a thing? I can’t think of a phone here in Europe that you can’t just put a SIM card from any carrier in and it will work.
From Fairphone's US order page
> Critical Notice: The device does not support LTE Band 13 (Verizon's primary coverage frequency).
Presumably that frequency isn't used in Europe? It also says that it's "not certified for use on the Verizon Wireless network." I don't know if that means Verizon might block it (which sounds like a very US thing) or it's related to not supporting the frequency that Verizon uses for LTE.
Because the United States sucks in regards to mobile phone compatibility and spectrum allocation. https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ
2 replies →
That's been true for much of the history of cellular networks, as far as I know - universal standards in Europe, US phones can't (always) be moved between service providers. It used to be even worse in the US, with phones locked to individual carriers regardless of technology.
That's some of the European over-regulation that everyone complains about, compared to unfettered American competition.
Interesting, the tech specs page said Verizon was supported but the carrier coverage page says it isn’t
Why use Verizon directly? It's insanely overpriced. US mobile and others provide better prices, service, features, security, and customer service. If it doesn't work on their towers, US mobile allows you to switch to at&t and t mobile towers.
Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m seriously thinking about switching to AT&T over this, but I would need to know if the frequencies are covered as good on AT&T.
I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
How are you going to innovate installing hundreds of thousands of cell towers across the USA?
Mobile network via satellite might increase number of network providers by 1 or 2, but the physics problem of needing tons of physical assets to create a wireless network usable by small, low powered devices remains.
I guess you could innovate some new physics that allows you to send wireless signals through more surfaces, that is also not ionizing radiation to animal and plant tissue, and doesn’t need a lot of power to send from a mobile device. That is a lot to ask, though.
2 replies →
What are you talking about? There are hundreds of different cell phones available for sale in the US.
1 reply →
Innovation in the US is mainly how many more creative ways they can suck money out of consumers.
> I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
The beginning of your sentence - "I can’t believe how few choices we have..." - can be applied equally sadly to other areas here in the U.S....such as but not limited to lack of choice of residential ISPs, or lack of choice (or generally mis-incentivized) healthcare providers, or lack of choice of mobile service providers, or, etc., or etc. And, of course, your last part of your comment asking where the innovation is? Well, innovation often is pocketed in those who control the capital, and only released little by little at the whims of releasing more capital. Sorry, i have to step away, cuz felt sad instantly just citing my own comments here. :-(
I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.
This always comes up, it will probably never happen, makes me sad as well.
Inb4 people complaining that Fairphones are overpriced lmao
[dead]