I can’t get my head around this decision. The review I’ve just read of the Fairphone 5 (2023; supported by OEM till 2031) was not that great for the price and the Pixel 7 (2022; supported by OEM till 2027) is that great either from today’s perspective.
Sure, longevity and extended official support are great, so is dual SIM with eSIM support, but the hardware should be up-to-date as well.
Or is there any new device with stable /e/OS support around the corner?
Otherwise, would you recommend going for a FP5 or Pixel 7?
I know, but unfortunately the comments below the mentioned review speak for themselves, the FP5 is just overall not good.
What especially puts me off is battery endurance (the battery capacity is just too small and it doesn’t help that you can swap it as it’s too much of a hassle on a daily basis) and although it’s coming with extended OEM support until 2031, I very much doubt that it will be of any use in a view years with that IoT SoC and “only” 8GB RAM (which means it is to be assumed that future Android versions will bring that hardware to a crawl).
There are much more capable smartphones out there for a lot less money, even my POCO F5 (from the same release year) is a lot better and has cost a lot less (with hope that it will get proper /e/OS support).
For now, I don’t really know, but I may be better off with a Pixel 7 if I can get a good deal on a new one. After all, it’s technically better than the FP5 as well and a good amount cheaper, with the only downside that OEM support will end in 2027.
If only there were a new flagship phone with future-proof specs (proper SoC, 12+ GB RAM and extended OEM support) for running /e/OS!
My average memory usage (RAM) of the Android operating system is 1.2GB on a Fairphone 4 with the latest stable version of /e/OS T. On a device with 8GB of RAM, that’s barely 15% of total memory. So I guess you have some margin until future Android versions.
/e/OS should be better off without that AI bullshit Google comes up with, but nevertheless, some more GB RAM to be on the safe side for the years to come surely don’t hurt (and it’s not that the FP5 is a low budget phone, even my POCO F5 has 12GB RAM).
I still run an android 11 based /e/OS on a 1,5GB RAM device released in 2013 (abandoned in 2016 with android 4 by its vendor), this device is repairable by this owner himself.
Majority of phones i see are broken and abandonned for that reason after less than 3 years…
You don’t buy a Fairphone if you want to compare specs.
Fairphones are reasonably priced for what Fairphone do regarding fair sourcing of materials, improving working conditions along the supply chain as well as repairability and sustainability efforts. Fairphone buyers are onboard with this.
“Future” (= now recent) Android versions by themselves neither did bring to a crawl my Fairphone 2 introduced with Android 5 nor my Fairphone 3 introduced with Android 9.
An individual choice of Apps might bring a phone to a crawl as well as one convenient in-place OS upgrade after the other as opposed to inconveniently but cleanly installing a new OS version from scratch.