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Comment by catonmylap | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would make a 5a version that is smaller and has lower specs and is therefore cheaper. I really like the idea of getting updates until 2031 and being able to just replace the battery.

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I really do hope they'll make a smaller and lighter phone. According to https://specs-tech.com/en/fairphone-5/ this weights 220 grams. It's almost twice of what I deemed to be a reasonable limit for a phone.

> It's almost twice of what I deemed to be a reasonable limit for a phone.

true. and it's not like 100g smartphones weren't possible ten years ago

I feel like a lot of the issue is because the new operating systems are a lot more power intensive and Google play services is always doing so much in the background, you need a super heavy battery just to get an all day battery life whereas older phones could get the same battery life with a lighter/smaller battery and less OS bloat.

Unless you're gaming, most of modern phone's battery usage comes from the LTE modem

Not modular ones.

It's comparable to the Pixel 7 Pro (212g) or iPhone 14 Pro (206g), but it would be nice to see that number trend downwards. I had a Pixel 4a in the past, and that seemed like a good balance between size and weight.

I second that. My ideal phone size would allow me to hold it in one hand and scroll/do everything with my thumb, but most are so big now it's kind of impossible.

All phones are moving closer to phablet in size because so many people want to watch TV on them.

I'm watching TV on my tablet now and typing this on my phone. As I'm watching news I could watch them on my phone in an overlay player and read HN in the browser.

My phone is about one inch too tall for my liking. I'd cut it shorter and make it lighter. It's a Samsung A40. It's not worth spending more than about 200 Euro when everything more expensive is worst size and weight wise. Featurewise this phone is more than enough.

That might be my next phone when my S7 gives up the ghost.

Well, iphone 13 mini is smaller…

Agreed. I honestly contemplated the Fairphone when my Samsung s7 finally died in April, but I ended up just getting the newest Samsung because it was smaller and most familiar to me. But oh how I miss the SD card slot.

A €700 pricetag is already relatively low on the smartphone price spectrum.

It is not. You’re just not in the market for lower tier smartphones, but lot of people are.

If you gifted them a 350€ phone and said it cost 1100€, I honestly be impressed if they'd notice without synthetic benchmarks or checking how many updates it'll still get. Make sure to pick a model with decent camera and oled screen, those are the noticeable differences, but there's no shortage of good options at that price point. Under 200 is where it gets tough.

There are a few too many compromises compared to other phones in this price range.

I think you still have to consider the "Fair" in Fairphone to be a significant selling point. That's not a bad thing, but it's not going to go mainstream until it competes with other phones on everything else at their price point.

Electric cars didn't go mainstream until Tesla (roughly) because before that they weren't competitive with mainstream cars in terms of performance, comfort, or other factors.

Electric cars are still not main stream.

And Fairphone can never be price competitive related to the specs when it is still paying workers more than others.

They can't do magic

Electric cars are mainstream in many countries, and I think a reasonable argument could be made that they are mainstream in the US now.

Fairphone is manufactured in Asia where wages are lower. Most smartphones are not made in sweatshops, so while pay may be low, it's unlikely that Fairphone are paying >2x the wages, and I'd bet it's fairly close to the wages others are paying.

I suspect most of their increased costs come from small production runs, and smaller purchase orders for components rather than paying workers more. These are issues that scale well as they become mainstream.

> They can't do magic

This is unfortunately true. I suspect getting to real scale would require investment of the level that Fairphone are unlikely to ever be able to get with their values. This is a failure of society and incentives, but complaining about it isn't going to fix it.

I feel like a better approach would be for Fairphone to tackle one issue, and make a phone that it much more competitive based on that, and scale up the issues they tackle as the business scales.

The only country I'm aware of where electric cars are more then a single digit percentage of total vehicles is Norway.

Single digit percentage sounds mainstream to me – 1 in 100 to 1 in 10 new cars being sold being electric makes them quite common. Given that there are quite a lot of manufacturers, and many models of car, no one manufacturer or model is much more than that (except perhaps the Ford F150 in the US, but that's a weird exception). This market isn't the smartphone market where 1 company controls a large chunk of the market, and the next 2-3 functionally control the rest.

>Given that there are quite a lot of manufacturers, and many models of car, no one manufacturer or model is much more than that

You're comparing manufacturers and individual models to an entire market segment. That electric vehicle prevalence is for all makes and models. The more accurate comparison in my mind would be to V8 cars from all manufacturers, or diesel vehicles from all manufacturers.

Lol. I paid 250 euros for the phone I'm typing this on, 240 for the phone before that, and 500-ish for my first Android because then it wasn't a high volume established market yet and that's simply what a good smartphone cost (past tense).

Paying 700 is not "relatively low", that's a huge premium which I'd be happy to pay to get my current hardware (from 2019) again but with ten years of software support and fair material sourcing and manufacturing wages. Unfortunately, the hardware is worse than what I've currently got (unwieldy size, no headphone jack, worse camera probably, no stereo speaker, no wireless charger), and the software downsides of the FP3 that I tried to adapt to for a few weeks were even worse than the hardware downsides. But anyway, that's all besides the point that 700 euros is not a normal price for a phone. If this lasts thrice as long as another 250-euro device then it's still not cheaper because the battery will need replacing.

I agree. 700 is steep... I pay just about as much as you do for phone, in fact I paid £290 for my current one.

I paid 390 USD (excluding taxes) in 2019 for my phone - Xiaomi Mi9T Pro, I'm from relatively poor country, so i personally wouldn't pay 700 for a phone, it's a pretty high price for me. What is more interesting actually, is that Fairphone 5's SOC have the same performance as Snapdragon 855 in my at this point 4 years old phone, which is also cheaper. Accoring to GsmArena performance of Qualcomm QCM 6490 used in Fairphone 5 comparable to the Snapdragon 778G which has the same score in GeekBench 5 and Antutu 9 as Snapdragon 855 [1]. At least it has 2 more GB of RAM (my phone has 6)

Maybe it's a bit sad that there isn't that much progress lately (compared to early to mid 2010s), but it also means that i will be able to continue to use my phone for several more years without much problems (Except for Android updates, but I already have custom ROM installed).

[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-85...

The SoC in FP5 is industrial grade hence long term support.

A lot of people think custom ROM is going to give you a secure device but hardware vulnerabilities sometimes have to be fixed on a higher level.

FP5 sports an OLED. Xiaomi devices don't AFAIK.

Its apples to oranges to compare with any Xiaomi device.

Xiaomi is not modular, ever. Xioami have no user replaceable battery or screen. Xiaomi have a proprietary UI (non-standard Android) and many do not allow to run a different OS than it came with. I wouldn't trust Xiaomi or any of that Chinaware with my PII.

FP4 allows all of that and its likely FP5 does, too. The nice thing about repairable smartphone with long software support is akin to iPhones (though from like X till 13 was tough to repair); great resale value and good hand-me-down for your kid.

Is 700 euro really that much? Considering it is probably most used device you have, something you use daily every day. For most people it is the only device with internet connection.

If you keep it for 5 years (until warranty runs out) is it 140 euro per year, 12 euro per month.

I pay 12 euro per month for netflix and I don't even think about it being expensive. Why wouldn't I spend same amount of money on the most important device I have? Except for computer maybe.

Water is vital for life but that doesn't justify paying three times more for water that is only better when doing a side-by-side direct comparison but is otherwise equally tasty (assuming it is also equally healthy).

I'd totally pay 7000 euros for a smartphone if it lasts five years and there are no cheaper options of virtually equal quality, but there are.

Saw a thread on Tildes yesterday where people argued for splurging on basically every necessity of modern life except water. If I tried to spend money on everything people were arguing for, I'd spend a significant fraction of my retirement fund before I'm done, and I'm happy with budget options also (but it takes a bit of time to find the minimum necessary, rather than buying expensive and it's usually fine)

The cameras are nice and the speaker is now stereo.

Headphone jack, add a $10 Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter to the end of your headphones; it has a great DAC in it: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

Is it? Even as someone in tech, that's more than I have spent on smart phones in over 10 years.

Samsung sells phones with comparable hardware for half that price, though that model will only be updated until 2028.

The Oppo A94 and the Oppo Find X5 Lite come pretty close for €259 or €294 respectively, with almost no update guarantees. The Xiaomi 12 Lite for €305 should be a bit better in terms of updates, but for the "standard" five years you should start looking at the Samsung models (A34 for €349, A65 for €380).

€700 is cheap for a repairable phone from a small company, but it's definitely not low on the smartphone price spectrum. Android phones that are slow, but honestly better than what I have paid €450 for a few years ago, are going for about €90 these days. Those phones even come with free chargers, something €2126 iPhones lack.

A 700€ pricetag is definitely premium for me. I can understand why they have to charge that much for the Fairphone, but personally I have never spent more than 250€ on a phone (smart or not).

My phone was €150. It does everything I need just fine. The screen is annoyingly big and it sends too much data to Google/HMD/whoever though. I would prefer to have the same phone but with AOSP android (as much as possible).

I don't see how phones have improved at all in the last several years, aside from the camera. In many ways they've gotten worse.

Given that my last 3 phones all died when I dropped them (in part because they're too big and too thin) I don't really want to spend a lot of money on one.

I really wish I could get a slider like an HTC Touch Pro 2 with a modern OS. Or just an iPhone 5C with software updates.

> Given that my last 3 phones all died when I dropped them

Might I recommend a phone case? I don't think I've ever heard of a phone breaking more than the screen visually cracking after dropping, even without a case, besides I think one time my cousin was repairing a phone whose touchscreen didn't work correctly anymore. I'm sure it happens but the amount of luck to have that three times in a row seems odd.

As for most of them being too large (especially the cheapest ones), I agree, that's why I bought a smaller phone second hand.

That can't be right. The last phone I bought (Xiaomi Mi 9) only cost me $600nzd and that's the most expensive phone I've bought.

And it's so powerful it still does everything I need years later.

Are normal people actually utilising phone specs these days? Sure some people game but surely everyone else is barely using the CPU etc

For me, the cameras are the main reason to go with a flagship phone.

Exactly. The camera is the only thing I will care about N years down the line when I look at pictures from past phones. It's a realization I've had only somewhat recently ~1-2 years ago.

The camera modules are commodity, the main distinction is in quality of lenses and the processing software.

My Moto G30 was 1199 NOK, about 120 EUR, two years ago. 128 GB storage, 64 MP main camera, 6.5" screen.

not really

i know a handful of ppl that have phones above 500euros, but most don't because they have other priorities or kids that might wreck it

because SoCs from 2018 (think SDM632) are easily able to run Android 13 and the production/marketing/buyer capacity so potent, the market and drawers at home are saturated. 4G will stay on the towers for another few years, so 30€ is the real low on the smartphone price spectrum - the device type is now ubiquitous.

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