Two years after the Fairphone 4 and following the release of some audio products like the Fairbuds XL, the Dutch company is back with a new repairable phone: the Fairphone 5. It looks and feels a lot like the Fairphone 4, but it adds choice upgrades across the board, making it the most modular and also most modern-looking repairable phone from the company yet.
The design is largely unchanged compared to the Fairphone 4, but the improvements that the company did make go a long way: The teardrop notch and the LCD screen is finally gone, with an ordinary punch-hole selfie and an OLED taking its place. Otherwise, you’re looking at an aluminum frame, a triangular camera array, and a removable back cover. Here, the company brought back its signature translucent back cover next to two black and blue variants. The dimensions and weight has been reduced ever-so-slightly compared to the predecessor.
But is the camera good?
Their promo video looks good. Though it is a promo video.
My guess is that it won’t have the bells and whistles of Samsung or Google Pixel devices. That doesn’t really seem to be the goal with the device though.
I’m excited for some real world tests. If we can get to at least an iPhone 13 quality of processing on the image, I’m in.
According to CNET not as good as pixel, but it is honestly fine (not great, but definitely fine) in my eyes.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/fairphone-5-review-the-phone-that-wants-to-save-the-world/
GSMArena says it’s a Sony IMX800 with a 1/5.6" sensor, which is pretty respectable hardware, better than many premium compacts from years ago. With the right camera app or post processing you can get decent images from this.
Qualcomm QCM6490
No good for free software OSes then :-(
Can you elaborate on why? Like, I’m not surprised, I just am not involved in this space enough to know why.
Proprietary drivers/firmware. Basically makes it impossible/very hard to develop custom ROMs/operating systems (the lack of openness makes it super hard to extend/modify/verify the software running on these chips).
The drivers are well separated via HAL so you can absolutely make custom ROMs/OSes without changing those. The Android OS has way more code above the HAL layer than below. You can’t however arbitrarily update the Linux kernel, modify the drivers or fix security issues found, beyond the security support window provided by Qualcomm.
- Manufacturers (e.g., Qualcomm, Samsung) won’t return your call unless you buy in huge quantities, hundreds of thousands or millions of units.
- Lack of documentation.
- Information restricted by NDA.
- Non-free binaries required for lots of hardware.
- Generally lording over the market and exploiting their position, to the degree of anti-competitiveness, and as a consequence artificially extending the rein of non-free software in the mobile domain.
- Astonishingly poor quality of engineering.
Are there any better alternatives? The only ones I’m aware of off the top of my head would be Samsung’s Exynos, Kirin, and MediaTek. From the little experience I have in the space it always struck me as Qualcomm being the least shitty option, not necessarily the best.
To be fair, Murena is going to be shipping a version of this with /e/ OS on it. https://mastodon.social/@murena/110978277374459512
I am so new to this so bear with me. There is Lineage OS for fairphone 4 - does this mean there won’t be FOSS ROMs available for the fairphone 5?
Lineage OS, graphene, caylx, yk the stuff you jailbreak a phone for. People are saying this can run Ubuntu touch, and yet other people are saying this will be troublesome for the Android ROM community to develop for. Bear with me, I’m new to the concept and certainly might be wrong about something.
The processer has Linux support though. Isn’t it more the device drivers that are the problem?
If thie phone gets mainline linux support I wil buy it in a heartbeat.
By the way. It does already have an entry on the postmarketos wiki https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp5)
Low-end hardware and a pretty much closed CPU you can’t do much with for 700 Euros? No, thank you.
You make it sound like 8 years of guaranteed support is something bad, lol.
I dont really understand this gripe. Can you explain why its a closed CPU that I cant do much with?
If the CPU isn’t a breadboard I can resolder any time I want and have to carry around in a suitcase what is the point?
6.46" is too large a screen. My pixel 6a is barely small enough. Also, bring back the headphone jack.
I was pained to move to iOS when my kids decided they wanted iPhones and I needed one to manage their parental controls, but boy do I love the form factor of the 12 mini I got.
Everything out there seems so huge now.
I’d love to have more options for smaller, manageable phones, especially as my workplace have given out work iPhones now, I could realistically go back to Android again come upgrade time as I can manage their accounts with that.
I really hope it does well, the business model really needs to change.
