The Fairphone 5 released, is the sleekest repairable phone yet

DannyMac@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 377 points –
androidpolice.com

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.

148

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

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.

you can absolutely make custom ROMs/OSes

You can't however arbitrarily update the Linux kernel

So you can't make free software OSes.

  1. Manufacturers (e.g., Qualcomm, Samsung) won't return your call unless you buy in huge quantities, hundreds of thousands or millions of units.
  2. Lack of documentation.
  3. Information restricted by NDA.
  4. Non-free binaries required for lots of hardware.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

Rockchip RK3399(S) is the best you can get in terms of freedom. The rest are much of a muchness.

What is the best open blob SoC available?

open blob SoC

What do you mean?

The highest performing SoC on the market with open source code the binaries are built from.

the binaries

Which binaries do you mean?

Firstly, probably the firmware of the CPU and associated hardware. Then, any specific drivers for ancillary hardware that might be closely integrated with the CPU.

Not even Purism was and to get the Librem 5 entirely closed-source free and it's probably a lot further along than the Fairphone.

the firmware of the CPU

AFAIK, there aren't any mobile CPUs with microcode like Intel CPUs.

and associated hardware

Rockchip RK3399 is the best you can get from my understanding. The newer Rockchip RK3588 requires a non-free blob for the GPU unfortunately.

Sure, I'm not claiming to be an expert here. Similar things to what an RPI4 firmware image is. Whatever that controls.

1 more...

What would be a good phone for free software OSes?

There are no good phones due to the way the SoC and modem manufacturers work. The best phones, like the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro, are simply the least bad.

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?

FOSS ROMs

What do you mean?

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.

No, it does not mean any of the projects you mentioned will be unavailable. None of those projects are free software OSes.

Fairphones have always used Qualcomm SOCs, there's nothing new here. I don't understand the fuss here if I'm being honest.

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.

The processer has Linux support though.

I said it's no good for free software OSes, I didn't mention Linux. I'm not sure what you think it means for Linux to support a processor or why you think that's relevant. Linux can be and often is used with non-free OSes.

1 more...