While they were happy with what the fairphone 4 brought to the table, they seem to like what was changed for the fairphone 5.
What are you guys’ opinions on this? A welcome change? would you get one if your phone died within the next year?
If you wanted them just for charging it would be fine. Barrel jacks are still pretty ubiquitous.
If you want them to also be data they get less great. They make 3.5mm/etc jacks with 3 “pins” and I assume more. But every time you’re inserting/removing the cable it’s rubbing past the insulators separating the contacts. Their failure per plug/unplug is higher than something like USB-C where the 24 contacts are being pushed together instead of brushing past each other. It would suck if you put in your USB-barrel and one of the contacts broke/bent.
Typical stereo headphones have 3 pins. Left, right, common ground. Tip, ring, and sleeve (not sure if the conductor order).
4-conductors used to be common for portable camcorders and early digital cameras. They’d put our composite a/v (extra conductor for video/yellow, still a shared ground). Tip, R1, R2, sleeve.
I’ve seen USB 2.0 (or perhaps 1.x) done over a 4-pin 3.5. And I’ve seen RS232 over 3.5 a number of times too (used to be common in ham radio in the 90s/early naughts).
It’s actually a bit crazy - and very impressive - that the cable I use to tickle-charge my phone at 15W could also be used to connect four 4K screens, an external GPU, multiple 10GBe network adapters all while providing well over 200W of power… if my phone supported and of that, that is.
That’s just the USB-C standard, to get 200W and 4k video you need the fancy shielded high-gauge cables.
