The Fairphone 6 no longer feels like a compromise (except in the US)
The Fairphone 6 no longer feels like a compromise (except in the US)
www.theverge.com
The Fairphone 6 no longer feels like a compromise (except in the US)
90 comments
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I love that they finally listened and added back the jack!
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Is this ironic or did they actually? I kind find any source saying they did.
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They did not. Source: I looked all over the one I'm holding.
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I wish!
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As a Fairphone 5 owner, 6 seams like a downgrade to me, with it's USB 2. I don't care about whatever refresh rate they have, USB alt mode is way more important to me, also dropping audio jack was bad enough already.
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Well, the audio problem is not going to be worse with 2.0. USB 2.0 can deliver 480Mbps. Audio data rates are in Kbps. Even at 192kHz, 24 bui studio recordings it is only 4.6Mbps. Stereo audio is easy from a digital perspective. Also, USB 2.0 is MUCH less susceptible to bad hardware design, bad cables and dongles, and bad shielding. A single twisted pair at low speeds and minimal negotiation is much simpler and almost never drops. In a joystick design I did, I had a 20cm long untwisted pair in testing and it never dropped at all.
USB 3.0+ (and especially external display capabilities) is an order of magnitude more noise sensitive, impedance variation limited, and susceptible to bad design. If you use a non-twisted cable, it won't even negotiate USB 3.0 and will only work with 2.0.
That being said, USB 3.0+ for large file transfers and an external monitor desktop mode would be so much better, but I guess not many people use those.
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Usb needs power. That means electricity that means more ftighin climate change.
Headphone jacks are smarter, clearer, and better for the environment
Usb head phones are trick. But hey. Who cates. Its the apocalypse
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So it still supports audio out via USB alt mode?
I'm not talking about only audio, video over USB-C is also nice to have.
To be fair I don't use it that often, but considering that I could never use wifi display streaming on e/os, I'm really happy I have it.
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Not looking for a new phone for a few more years from now. But when I do I really hope that this phone will be available with a better camera and that Linux mobile options will be mature as well.
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The fairphone 5 actually did extremely well if you look at MKBHD's camera competition in 2024. If you don't care about having very over-saturated, over-sharpened, images that pop on social media, then it is actually very competitive (except for with the pixel beating everyone). Miles better than a HMD global or Samsung A-series camera. It looks better than the Samsung S series and daylight iPhone in many shots.
I think the 6 has a similar camera. It's never going to beat a DSLR, but it isn't meant to.
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The value of the fp is the refurbished market. All the component can be replaced, and the system will be maintained for years by the os.
I'm happy to see a new one in the market, because it means I will be able to upgrade my fp4 for cheaper now! 😁
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Still no 3.5 mm jack.
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Is this a real complain or I'm too obtuse to understand this as a running joke?
I mean there have been usb c to 3.5 for quite a while now.
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This is a real complaint, and for me personally, it's a complete dealbreaker.
There have been converters, but I don't want to choose whether I want to charge my phone or listen to music (¿por qué no los dos?, i.e. "why not both?"). I also don't want to add up lines of dongles for something as primitive and actively used as a headphone jack.
3,5mm jack doesn't take much space and is used by many people, so why remove it?
For regular companies, the answer is clear: to sell you wireless devices often produced by the same companies, costing more.
But for Fairphone, a "fair" company that always shipped their phones with it, this seems like a betrayal. Failing to mention this giant point of concern is not great for a review article, either.
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It’s a real complaint to an extent; The real issue is that the jack itself isn’t enough, to be worth anything it needs a good DAC behind it and there have only been a handful of phones ever that have had that. So the jack complaint itself is mostly a meme as yeah, the USBC splitter option would sound just as good as most jacks built in.
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Real complaint.
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yeah so? If you need to regularly use one of those then that is a good argument for having it in the device itself
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I bought 4 of these before I've found one that does not add background noise that hurts ears.
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$600 I'd go for it... $900 in the US... :-( can't justify it. I'll keep watching closely though. I so want one of these. As well as a Framework laptop, in the future.
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900 as a flagship price, for mid tier phone, not worth it.
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Article is paywalled for me
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Best I could come across. Can’t access the other archive sites atm for some reason.
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They decided to paywall the verge for me too
But it's perfectly visible with noscript
The fun part is that I used to whitelist the verge on my ad blocker because I liked it. Ok, you get nothing, then
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Also works to just stop loading the page when the text and images appear, lol.
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these phones seem pretty intriguing to me with their focus on repairability but i genuinely don't see the point of they don't come with an audio jack
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Lol tariffs singing their magic tune for Trumpistan?,
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We are required to sing doot doot doot here, by law.
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I'm very tempted to get one, at least once there's a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it's still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there's an "issue" with my google account (which doesn't exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.
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/e/OS is a pretty good de-Googled alternative, fully supported. :)
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And based on lineage!
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I might try it out then. I've heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I'll see this week about swapping over.
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/e/OS is good, I also use Calyx with MicroG and all of my bank apps work.
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I've been using my FP6 with e/os for a week now and I'm very happy with it.
My phone before it was a S10.
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"
<good thing>
is no longer a compromise (except in the US)"Yeah that's about what I expect 🥹
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Canada please!
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for me the dealbreaker is the lack of a second physical sim slot. I really like the concept of Fairphone and would absolutely buy one, but I have a work sim and a personal one, both physical (not eSim) so Samsung it is for now
90 comments
I find it interesting how every post I see on Lemmy about Fairphone always has half of the comments complaining about the lack of a head home jack, but in real life I don't know a single person that really laments it's removal. All the people I personally know are fine with Bluetooth headphones. This is just such a loud minority, it's impressive. I know that there is overlap between people that want a headphone jack and people that want a repairable phone, but still, I feel it's way over-represented in the comments.
Since you asked, the lack of the headphone jack is the exact reason I have not upgraded my phone. I use my phone for music in my two cars and my home gym. None of those currently have Bluetooth.
Upgrading all 3 is just a matter of money of course - throw everything I have away & buy new. I see no reason to do that.
For the car, I use a tunai firefly ldac, it's an incredibly simple and reliable device.
They're fairly cheap at ~35$, and can be reused if you change cars. I ended up using mine to make my home stereo system wireless after my last car was replaced.
I hated the loss of the jack until I got lightning/usbc headphones. The microphone and sound controls are so good I honestly widh my steam deck had a second USB c slot rather than a headphone jack
You can get a splitter and/or dock to get there, but obviously it's not as nice as built in
https://youtu.be/BqxHwgfu6Sg
They largely brought that on themselves. I mean obviously they did by removing the jack, but I think moreso by claiming to be better than the rest of the industry - and charging a premium for that difference.
When Samsung removed the jack it was annoying, and also very hypocritical as they had made fun of Apple for that just a year before, but it was to be expected from a corporation like that. These guys promised they weren't like that, and then did the same thing.
You can imagine it like this: if you see an ad by a pop star trying to sell you some bullshit product that doesn't work you'd think "that's shitty" and move on. But if you saw the same ad, but instead of the plain old pop star it was the members of Rage Against the Machine, you'd notice that a lot more. Everything they had done before would ring hollow, and every time someone would bring them up you'd remember that they're just posers looking to make a buck off of a demographic.
And that's how I feel about this phone. Just posing as something better.
I can see that, that's a fair point, but I don't think it's malicious from their standpoint. I just think that when you look at their sales, they really are trying to cut down costs as much as possible while retaining their main goals of being a repairable phone with ethical materials, because in the end, if they're not profitable, they won't be making phones anymore, and then you won't have a company making repairable or ethical phones at all. Headphone jacks are a relatively easy thing to remove because realistically, very few people use them nowadays. There is a vocal minority that wants them but they really are just a minority, and catering to every single niche for a company as small as them isn't realistic.
You have been visited by the USB-C port. This post is now protected against headphone jack jihadists
Give me a phone with two USB-C ports so I don't need a dongle when I wire up to my USB-C headphones and battery bank
USB-C FTW!
cause you live in a part of the world, that has already gave up. including yourself.
I mean, I didn't give up anything? What do I have to give up? The user experience is objectively way better with wireless earbuds. You don't have to care about a cable being tugged around, battery life is a non-issue for me. I've never ran out of battery on my headphones and modern connectivity is pretty good, I've never had them fail to connect or anything like that. The only people that have any sort of benefit from wired headphones are audiophiles, that I can assure you 95% of people are not. They will not notice a difference between the headphone jack and wireless earbuds. Even if you gave me a headphone jack, I wouldn't use it. I just do not have a reason to use one. I've been using wireless Wi-Fi headsets for my PC for a long while now, I don't even use a headphone jack on my PC. It's just way more convenient having wireless headsets.
I still use a wired headphone.
You can't beat the battery life of Infinity. Go non stop for a complete day and even or you forgot to charge, keep using the next day without any downtime.
For me, this is just one less thing to worry about.
Plus, I can use mine on flights instead of their sorry excuse of electronic waste.
My wireless headphone batteries last weeks and I can use them on planes?... Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.
I just want the option. Sure I use bluetooth 98% of the time, but when I'm in a car I'd rather hook in through the jack than the tooth. And when I'm out hiking I also like the jack option so I don't have to worry about my blutooth battery dying, bluetooth draining my phone faster, loosing an earbud in the leaves and so on.
I mean, I get that. It's just that I'm triggered by the amount of people that constantly comment on every thread raging about how dare they not include a headphone jack. It's insane how loud this minority is when in real life very few people actually care about it.
Bluetooth was specifically designed to be very low power. With a bluetooth headphone there is a battery in the headphone to power the amplifier and provide the energy to move the speaker diaphragm. With passive (wired) headphones, this has to be powered by your phone.
Do you really think that a phone that has to directly drive the speakers in a headphone uses less power than a phone that only has to power the bluetooth transmitter?
I love wired headphones, but I wouldn’t ever drive them directly from my phone. Especially higher end headphones are more difficult to drive anyway, so I use a (wired) external DAC/amp with it’s own internal battery for using my wired headphones.
I absolutely hate wired headphones. It always get tangled, breaks or otherwise gets fucked up. I now have an Audeze Maxwell headphone and as a backup to their dongle, The LDAC bluetoooth codec combined with Qobuz Hifi sound is perfect for me.
Never missed the 3,5mm port.
The only thing in not loving is the planned obsolecense of most battery Bluetooth headsets.
(I do recognise and respect others for wanting the 3,5mm port, of course. To each their own preferred way of strangling themselves when listening to audio I guess)
Do you wish people would stop requesting the headphone jack? Why?
The comment doesn't wish for anything, it simply makes an observation
Up until I got an amazing pair of bluetooth headphones I would also fall under the loud minority. I still want the option on any device I own, but I haven't been using wired ones much outside of things like my Sega Genesis.
Definitely agree the loud minority feels overrepresented, but I'm personally siding with them.
At first, I was like, "…How did I never know it has one of those?" until I realized I have a model 2.
Not sure why, but BT experiences interference when in my pocket. The signal gets choppy when sections of my torso get in the way. Which is always when my phone is in my pocket. So I got USBC headphones/dongle.
On a bike ride, I noticed the audio was starting to disconnect. This happens often on rides and runs since the USBC plug sticks out a lot from the port and slowly wiggles loose. Except this time it wasn't loose. The leverage of the long plug on the short connector damaged the port. This never would have happened with a headphone jack. It has a strong connection that can rotate freely. Now I have a phone that can't charge or play music.
My next phone will be a sony xperia some they still have the jack and still allow the bootloader to be unlocked.
I call shenanigans on this statement. This exact scenario with a 3.5 mm would have seen the copper inside the connector break from stress. As someone who went through the evolution of Walkman, discman and mp5 players, I can't count the amount of wires I destroyed just having them in my pocket when walking or riding. Even high end woven wires and shit, end up failing due to mechanical stress. It is just entropy. I've had more headphones in my life than I can recall, but somehow BT headphones have lasted me 3 years, more than any of the cheap wired headphones of the past. Only my expensive sannheisers have lived longer and that's partially due to the fact they have detachable wires. So I can change them when they start to wear.
Are you sure it's not a problem specific to your headphones or your phone? Unless you've got some sort of prosthetics/pacemaker or something like that your torso should definitely not be causing interferences.