Seems like it would appeal to a similar crowd
As soon as they can be used easily in the U.S, I’ll get one.
What carrier do you have? I’m on T-Mobile and the bands are roughly the same as the device it replaced (iPhone SE). It’s just missing the 700mhz (B12) band. (No 5g support if that’s a thing you need)
eeeh, you’re missing a few. Band 66 isn’t too bad but the lack of band 12 and 71 will hurt. You really start to miss those once you get out of the city, especially once they decide to cut their 3g network in the near future. That’s your lower speed but long range coverage
I’ve had a Fair Phone 3 for 18 months ish now. Expensive for an average phone but no complaints
Honestly that’s not a bad deal at all. I’m genuinely surprised. The 720p screen is a bit of a “meh” from me, but honestly I didn’t have a problem with that on my old moto g8 power. No charger is annoying, I get it’s for “eco” reasons but I’ve never thrown a working one out. They go around the house to make life easier or I give em out to friends. I hate that industry trend. The omission of headphones is fine though, they’re usually garbage.
I’ll have to keep an eye on it. It’s missing band 66 and 71 on tmobile but it at least has band 12. Thanks for letting me know about that!
I’m from the US living in Germany at the moment. I have 2 Fairphone 3s and one Fairphone 2 being used in my family.
What I learned a long time ago, and as an app developer is that phone performance is pretty stagnant. Low tier and mid-tier still do everything from the app perspective of the high tier phones.
Spending ~$500 on a phone that will last 7-10 years is a very cost effective solution.
I really can’t, for the life of me, figure out WHY Fairphone just hasn’t sourced a US complaint cellular modem. All they would need to do is swap that out.
I’m heading back in a year, and I’ll try to use the phones in the states then.
I know someone else got a Terracube with /e/ on it (this is on all 3 of my fairphones) and I think that is a good solution as well.
I mean, it is and it isn’t
A phone with 2gb of ram (flagship from 2014, midrange were like, 1gb or less) felt dreadful just a couple of years ago. Apps keep getting hungrier and hungrier, and ram starts to really be a bottleneck.
Then there’s the lack of OS updates, which can really hurt you after a while once app developers stop making apps that support older OS versions.
Regarding US compliant modems, that’s a good question. I ask myself that all the time when I look at xiaomi devices
To get away from the stagnant OS updates, you need a phone like the Fairphone where support is intended to last much longer. Then couple that will an OS like E Foundation and you continue to get updates.
Granted kernel updates are going to be dependent on the SoC maker and Fairphone, BUT E takes care of a large chunk of that as well. My daughter is using a Fairphone 2 with /e/. That phone is 7 years old, and yet she is able to run everything she wants today. Sure it isn’t the snappiest, but it totally works.
@Ian_Darwin wrote a piece about his Teracube 2e. I looked into it, and decided to keep using Pixels flashed with GrapheneOS for now. Teracube looks very interesting overall, though. I would prefer a bit more of a powerful device, ultimately, but I will keep my eyes out for their next launch.
ĂŤ also have a Fairphone 3 and I am very happy wit it. I installed LineageOS on it to have more freedom and be independent from Google etc. Before that I had a Shift 6m.
What was your impression of the Shift 6m? I’ve been eyeing that project with some interest.
Was the main reason for the move to degoogle? Or was there something preventing you from using an alternative OS?
I have a Teracube 2e. It’s…fine? I put /e/ on it, and it runs it reasonably well, but the hardware is pretty slow already, so it’s hard to imagine it being a tolerable phone for 4 years.
I did get it as a “I’m okay if I lose / drop this” phone for travel, especially since it has dual sim support - but using it can be a little painful if you need something to happen quickly.
You have to get used to it being a bit more “square”, but otherwise it’s actually attractively designed from the outside. At the time I bought it, the only alternative was the Fairphone 2, which had older hardware and seemed a bit clunkier, so I opted for the Shift. As is always the case when you make such decisions, about a month after I bought the Shift, the Fairphone 3 came out and things looked very different, as I found both the design better and the performance better. I then passed on my Shiftphone - which is still being actively used right now until it’s not - and got the Fairphone 3.
I am generally a bit paranoid about surveillance on the Internet and so on, and after reading various articles and watching documentaries on the subject, and in the Fairphone forum it was written that there is now finally an officially supported version of LineageOS 17.1 (i.e. Android 10), I decided to install that.
Well even more than that, but they officially support and you can buy it directly preloaded with /e/ foundation, which is a fork of Lineage but with many quality of life improvements.
I’m running it on all three of the fairphones I have (two 3s and one 2).
Have the fairphone 3, in the United States, Florida. I get 4g frequently but it doesnt really matter since when im driving i only need 3g for the phone calls. Hopefully they release more products in the US soon.
I love supporting ethically made and repairable products. My framework batch 1 laptop runs popos and the fairphone 3 runs /e/ but wanting to switch to lineage os soon.
I have a proud Fairphone 3 user in Czech Republic. For Framework Laptop, I bought it by a shipping forward service. (It doesn’t mean I would recommend shipping forward service.) As I am moving my flat soon, the laptop is still in a storehouse of the shipping forward company in US.
Why is that? I know that /e/ is a firm of Lineage OS, but is there a reason beyond that?
While /e/ os runs faster on boot, there are some forks of applications that require an account to use which i don’t like personally.
I might as well use lineageOS and then use the bliss launcher.