this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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As the owner of a Fairphone 4, don't get one.
It's sold as a 5G phone but crashes intermittently if you actually enable 5G. I bought a 5G phone and I'm still on 4G. I wish I could say that's the most of the problems, I could live with that.
The software support, in my opinion, is falsely advertised. You do get 5 years of kernel and Android updates but the system-on-chip updates, which aren't made by Fairphone, end October of this year. That's a whole important part of the updates which cease only 2 years into support.
Then, there's the real kicker; the hardware root of trust has the (publicly available) AOSP test keys installed. This means anyone can sign and flash a verified ROM if they have access to the unlocked phone. That's perhaps not too important for most people, but it screams incompetence and it means you cannot trust a second hand device.
When the SoC support is up, I'm moving to a Pixel. I'm done rolling the dice on Android phone manufacturers and I want a well implemented device.
What baseband silicon does it mount ?
As a Pixel user I don't know if I would class the Pixel as a better choice to anything, but I still haven't moved to Graphene admittedly (my bad).
I think it's a Qualcomm Snapdragon SM7225.
It's not really about better, it's more knowing what I'm getting. It's not their fault that Qualcomm's support is only 3 years (at the time) or that it takes them 10 months to develop support for the chosen SoC which eats into part of that 3 years. Still, I got the phone thinking I would have a reasonably secure device for 4-5 years which wasn't entirely accurate.
I love the idea and, if you're willing to sacrifice some security for sustainability, that's great. I just want people to know what they're getting into because I didn't.