I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I'd really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.
What a shithole civilization.
Fairphone is probably going to be my new phone when I upgrade.
I'd love one and have checked back each year after their first model, but they still don't sell to Australia - and I'm not going to buy something I can't get direct parts and services for, and would need to go through third parties for.
If their model is a successful business I honestly thought they would have expanded beyond shipping/supporting only Europe by now, its been a decade since their first model. Maybe they're still not a very big player / modest success?
There's at least two limitations that they've mentioned before with shipping outside of Europe.
First is they need extra certifications (e.g. FCC ones for selling to the USA), which are expensive and basically redundant. Probably not worth the business cost to do it and maintain it.
Second is they do carbon neutral shipping, which is hard to do when you have to cross an ocean. I know in Canada our national postal service can do carbon neutral for packages, but figuring that out for every country and the international legs of the shipping is a lot of work.
Part of the cost of being ethical is being at a disadvantage with capitalism, so while they're doing pretty alright they aren't going to grow like big tech did.
Think I'm getting it, my Redmi Note 8 is aging and I'm pretty sure the current batch of custom ROMs is basically the last apart from the fact that the kernel is no longer supported, and Xiaomi is closing the doors on custom ROMs more and more it seems. Yeah, the new FP isn't perfect but it seems good enough to pull the trigger, and while the Pixels seemed like a good alternative in some aspects, Google recently made it very clear where they see Android's future, and it's not more open.
Looks like they hit the nail strong and sharp on this one. I am still using my 2019 Nokia which does not look like it's going bust anytime soon. Too bad, I would have loved to use the FF6
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
