this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
492 points (94.2% liked)
Technology
59593 readers
2920 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Same here, they lost me after fp1 which didn't receive security updates anymore. FP2 had this weird rubber band that got loose quickly with everyone I know who had one. Stopped following after that.
Ultimately the problem is Google. The minimum system requirements for Android keep going up with every release and Google stops providing updates to older releases at some point (typically 5 years after that version was initially released). That effectively puts an upper bound on the lifespan of any phone as at some point the phones CPU and memory aren't good enough to run the latest Android version at acceptable speeds. The lower end a phone was at original manufacturing the faster this all happens as well.
Apple is just as bad (far worse in some ways).
I've tried to find a solution, and the best I've seen is Linux phone, but that comes with some major downsides that are going to be deal breakers for most people. The two biggest ones are that battery life is abysmal unless you enable hibernation, but doing so, at least a year or so ago when I looked into it, disables your ability to receive calls while the phone is in hibernation. And secondly that NFC essentially doesn't work, or at least not for anything you care about like being able to make payments.
I tried a Pinephone with postmarketOS and I concur with the battery life - I could never use the pinephone practically, because in standby laying in the shelf, the battery is dead in about 30 hours.
I so wished there was a Linux distribution with proper phone support & tuned to sustain the battery power, but usable with a docking station.
My dream is to no longer have to carry a laptop anywhere, just my phone, and a keyboard (if needed) and mouse, and a USB-C hub with HDMI cable, mouse & keyboard USB ports, then plug in that phone to a hotel TV or a monitor at a business partner's place and work directly on the phone.
Laptop stays reserved for stuff that requires more computing power than LibreOffice.
Absolutely, Pinephone is an awesome project for tinkering, but it's not a practical alternative to just buying a cheap phone.
A pity since I love the convergence package + phone, but battery is dead before I have used the phone...
Well, with fp1 specifically Google was not the main culprit. The phone used a chip (I think by mediatek?) and the producer didn't publish the drivers. The Fairphone team promised to reverse engineer that for a while and at some point just said they won't do it after all. That was the reason you couldn't install other images on it, not cpu speed
The FP2 rubber casing was discontinued for that reason, but the cheap plastic shells also broke quickly (well - from falls, mostly :D so they did accomplish what they are there for: protect the phone itself from breaking). I think beyond the initial rubber shell (which also disconnected from the harder plastic shell for me) I went through 3-4 hard shells, all of which I got for free from FP though on community meetings @ the FP HQ.
Yeah, but I'm not convinced by their approach anymore as a sustainable solution. Luckily the phone feature race has mostly come to a halt, so there is a chance now for free OS options to come up (which is what we're seeing at the moment).
The part about tracking where the material comes from us good in principle, but mostly as a proof of concept so regulators can increase pressure on big manufacturers (if Fairphone can do it, apple/Samsung should also be able to). But regulators don't regulate, unfortunately
Regulators gonna ~~regulate~~ take bribes, I guess