Fairphone 3 announced (for pre-order)

#1

I’ve been using a Fairphone 2 all this year and love it, having switched from using iPhones all my life.

I felt like I had taken a couple of hits with its lack of a finger print sensor and NFC but the repairability of the device and the ethos of the company more than made up for it. The phone is designed to be easily taken apart and repaired (with affordable spare parts), and they put a lot of effort into sourcing their raw materials carefully (avoiding conflict minerals as far as possible) and fair manufacturing.

The Fairphone 3 was announced a couple of days ago and now I’m slightly excited.

The battery is larger, storage and RAM have both doubled, it’s gone from quad-core to octa-core, the screen is slightly larger, there’s NFC, there’s a finger print sensor, the cameras have improved. And best of all it seems to have adopted an iPhone 4 form with flat sides and a more solid construction. It might be my perfect phone.

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If only half the point wasn’t to avoid waste and keep your phone as long as possible. :joy:

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#2

It’s really nice that they sell official spare parts.

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#3

If only it ran iOS instead of creepy spyware on behalf of an advertising company it would be my perfect phone too.

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#4

I had an early version of the Fairphone 2 and had too many issues with it such as having to reseat the screen due to the touchscreen stopping working. Also the phone being slow, though I probably had too many apps installed. I’m now a regular user of NFC (something Apple don’t give developers access to) for checking my travel smart cards and Android pay, which the old phone didn’t support.

The Fairphone 3 looks a good set of specs which are similar to my current phone, and has the things I was missing in the previous version. Once my current phone is no longer usable and needs an upgrade (hopefully another year or two or more, though could be less due to the current trump created trade spat) than I’ll consider the Fairphone again, though maybe I’ll be able to keep this one long enough that there is a Fairphone 4 out.

The only feature I see so far as possibly missing is higher frame rates for the camera. Though in reality don’t use the high frame rates often at the moment and could get a real camera for that if needed.

Would be interesting if it would be able to run Mapillary capture as well as my current phone, which seems to do pretty well, whereas my previous Sony which was marketed for its camera would overheat very quickly. Even using the built in camera for around 10 or 15 minutes would cause it to overheat and stop the camera.

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#5

With you there, but I run LineageOS (without Play Services) on my Fairphone 2 and it works great.

Edit: Fairphone do have a good track record on this, they maintained builds of the AOSP for the previous models.

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#6

Would be interesting if it would be able to run Mapillary capture as well as my current phone

Mapillary looks interesting, but I can’t quite work out what it is from the website! :laughing:

Fair enough on the camera considerations. I can honestly say that I’d take a phone with no camera at all if it was perfect in every other respect, so not my highest priority.

#7

A crowd sourced Street view system. The paid model is for companies and local authorise to have a system for uploading and viewing their own sourced Street view images.

Most of my photos are now taken on my phone, saves having to carry a separate device which is hard to share the photos from.

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