I am a US customer. I have a 3-year old Teracube 2e zirconia that has done generally well, but is showing its age and I want to replace. I do not want to replace my 3-year old phone with another 2e or the 3-year old Fairphone 4 which are the only options with a removable battery on the Murena store. I want a Fairphone 5. People are clearly bringing Fairphone 5 into the US and using them without much trouble.
Why isn’t Murena selling them here? Is it a question of profitability? Is it a question of regulations that I’m not seeing? What’s up? Without a good reason for waiting, why shouldn’t I buy a FP 5 from Clove (the link above) and install /e/ OS myself (which I’ve done for my previous two /e/ phones)?
I’d really like to support Murena sales, but I’m not interested in buying a new phone if it’s not an upgrade in some way.
I have a fairphone 5 and my wife uses a fairphone 4. I got a 5 as i wasnt sure how well the 4 would peform and if i were to do it again i would probably lean towards the 4 as it has support in the statea plus the performance is almost equivalent to the 5 for my use case. I came from the terrachbe 2e as well!
Thanks! Yeah, looking back at my post I seem to imply that newer is always better, but that wasn’t my intent. If the Fairphone 4 is the 1990 Honda Civic of phones, maybe I should just get one. Is there anything you specifically don’t like about the 5, though, or is it just that for your use case, it wasn’t worth the extra money?
Also, if anyone can chime in about features on the FP 5 that might “future proof” it relative to the FP 4, I’d be curious to know. I’m still traumatized from when the mobile carriers decided to stop supporting 3G and my beloved Moto G4 Play became a WiFi-only phone toy.
I only use the Fairphone 3 as my everyday driver, but there is one obscure exclusive feature of the FP4: The Fairphone 4 allows a hot switch of the battery, i.e. if your FP4 is powered on and connected to charge, you can open it and change the battery with the FP4 not powering down from the switch. No Fairphone before and after allows this.
The FP5 is good, but I’ve noticed its more unstable compared to the FP4. One bug that has been annoying is random reboots. It shoud be fixed with 2.4, guess time will tell. For my use case i need a reliable phone that can run work related apps plus a decent camera. From what I’ve seen with my wife’s FP4 6GB RAM, it meets everything I need with performance that closely matches the FP5. I could of saved like $200 but oh well, regardless which way you go it’s a massive upgrade from the teracube 2e.
