Technically, no, I think. (Vietnam, South Korea, the EU (Gigaset)?)
But also, there’s a difference between “built in China” and “designed, built, and controlled by a company in China that may be beholden to their political and security force directives.” (I don’t mean the Murena phone, of course.) Hopefully, the big name phone manufacturers do some quality control and testing to verify integrity of their devices received from the PRC.
(But we should probably leave that discussion aside for the moment.)
The big difference between GAFAM and Murena is that Murena is a foundation. What is its goal? To break even or to grow exponentially to copy the GAFAM model?
Murena’s own approach is more than honorable.
I never said I wanted a cheap smartphone, I just said that it is possible to switch to /e/os at lower cost because this OS is free. Even stronger, murena’s business model allows for ethical phones (and fairphone is not especially “cheap”) via fairphone.
You are right to say that we are sweet dreamers, but we can’t boast of selling a de-googlized smartphone, respectful of data and ethical without even raising the question of how the phones are made.
We are not trying to defeat them but to propose another model!
This is possible via the purchase outside the store murena or even thanks to the reconditioned!
Once again this is the case thanks to the partnership with fairphone
Well for one it is not a Cool Pad S even though the spec look similar. On the China built part, not sure if there is any phone which does not have some component coming from China. Users had been requesting us for a /e/OS phone for a long time, and this is the first attempt at a Murena phone. We will be coming out with more such Murena phones based on the response we get for this initial release. The response so far looks extremely positive.
Yes, I was being hyperbolic. Samsung, ASUS, Purism and Sony aren’t made in China. But even these phones, a lot of the parts are only available from China. I’m not sure that any phone is completely manufactured and has zero parts made in China.
May I rememind you that I was already talking about this argument in the third post of this thread.
Since this knockout argument is raised over and over again.
Yes, as already mentioned its true most phones are made in china or do have at least parts made in china. But also again as others have said its completely different if a company is entirely chinese and not observed through companies having higher labour standards up the supply chain. And also parts/devices can be completely manufactured in a sweatshop and others are manufactured in a human friendly factory site. One should raise the ethical question why is this phone so cheap?
Gigaset is quite cheap albeit having some of the assembly in EU because they could find a way to implement robot assisted workplaces for the manual assembly. This leads to higher quality less rejects making the higher labour standard worth. Just an example.
Against the argument of “yeah but apple and google and are doing it too” - I think the most users here are not using/buying this devices because they have concerns with the ethical standing of the companies. Softwarerelated ethics are going along with a generalized ethic mindest. Thats one argument why we are using /e/.
In addition to this - the /e/ shop product portfolio shows that /e/ and Murena want to target the ethical aware consumer. Otherwise why having Fairphone/Teracube/Refurbished in a row without Huawei, Xiaomi, etc?
Again I do understand the need for money to keep this project running. I think its great that this phone is so well adopted and people want /e/OS.
And I’m 100% sure that this device is great - but I don’t understand the paradox of:
we have a transparent os,
we have transparent cloud services,
we have transparent phone suppliers with ethical dedication…
and because of ethical concerns we sell refurbish phones too
But our first own branded phone is
untransparently produced somewhere? and we don’t even want to talk about where it is produced and how…
This simply doesn’t add up at least not for the /e/ foundation as very well pointed out by @Nicolas_Sas
Thank you for your answer. I’m sure people will appreciate Murena launching its own phone. However, this does not answer the question in the title of this topic: Who is making the murena one?
I’m just asking for some transparency and who is outsourcing/building this phone. That doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally wrong . And yes you can be proud to launch your own phone.
Basically who is the company that provides this phone? If it’s not a Cool Pad S, then what is? I just ask.
This recent hands-on report states that even from the Murena One device settings you can only tell that it is a ‘Model X2’. So I’d also assume that it’s a custom one. But I also cant understand why the secrecy?
Just noticed, in this weekly /e/ developement update from April 2022 they stated that the vendor has stopped its production. I cant seem to find it listed in the official Gigaset shop listed anymore, so seems legit. I’m not sure if we should shed a tear on having no more Murena Gigasets, though. Seems Gigaset lost it’s credibility not only as of green washing but also cause of how they maintain their security and customer relations (see news reports from mid 2021). There are certainly better choices: Fairphone, Teracube, Shiftphone, PinePhone, rephone.
Speaking of PinePhone, IMHO objectives for a future phone should be:
Open Hardware,
bootloader unlocked,
sustainable,
repairable,
ethically produced,
degoogled,
based on Open Source software
Yes, currently we cant have all of that at once, but why not define it as the ultimate objective and let’s have a go instead going backwards like with Murena One?
And yes, I know, not everybody would and could pay for that, then why not do a crowdfunding first and you’ll see there a plenty of people who want to invest in a device with the specifics mentioned above and maybe to that degree that we can lower the price for everyone?
ok. its rather old they have released recently GS5. GS4 was already released inbetween. So this is no reason to stop a general cooperation.
Thats why I originally thought Gigaset is such a compromise - its not good as FP but the profit margin and the features are enough to produce/sell a good budget phone without beeing on the very bad side of sweatshops.
even if slightly OT. I havent’t tracked the Gigset news could provide an article about the mentioned issues pls?
Btw
The pictures of the phone in this article show a different style. Its not like the Coolpad S anymore - look at the cameras and how they are placed and embedded.
Both are privacy phones with a “no google/apple” idea.
It is interesting that ultimately this is now a phone used by two privacy focused alternatives to Google Android. Is there a connection or partnership between E/OS and BraxOS?
