1. No wireless charging. Switching to this phone would require a big change in my household's ecosystem (sorry to use a big word for a small thing, but I can't think of a better one). We have $10 wireless charging discs all over the place, and it's nice to be able to charge whenever we set our phones down. I don't want to take a step backward.
2. The Verge's review suggests the camera is OK but not great. I've been taking Pixel photos for years, and my phone is always the one people ask to use for group shots at social events. I don't want to fuss with taking a picture ten times just to get the lighting right, and the Pixel almost always meets the bar on the first shot. It sucks that a consumption device like a phone has this one critical input feature, and that there is still so much of a computational photography gap between certain brands and the rest, but that's how it is, and it prevents me from seriously considering any of them. (This isn't unique to Pixel; I hear Apple does well in this area, too.)
3. Just a nit: why is the case 40 euros? I expect to pay a premium for the phone because of the specific compromises in the design and the resulting low volumes. But this is just another run-of-the-mill TPU case that I expect I'd have to routinely replace every couple years. I don't use screen protectors, but I have an even more allergic reaction to the 33-euro price of the one for sale. I know there are aftermarket options, but I'm already taking a risk of poor part/accessory availability in the future because it's a niche product, so I don't know whether they'll still be available when I need them years from now.
By the way, I do own a Framework laptop (11th-gen CPU), and I like it a lot. I plan to swap out the motherboard next year. Unlike the Fairphone, the Framework didn't impose cost and performance compromises right out of the gate. I support sustainability, but there's only so far I'm willing to go.
1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-... (too much catastrophic conclusions in this article but that percentage is real, you could check it in another tests, articles, whatever ..)
2. Totally agree with that, if camera is fundamental for you maybe not the right choice.
3. They also take compromises to have an ethical production, try to guarantee there is no exploitation as much as they could, from the extraction of mineral, manufacturing ... (they didn't do it for all, but they are advancing as far as they could, also with all existing certifications for that, so it's normal that is expensive. So our choice to value that things, if we could afford it, or not.
>1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-... (too much catastrophic conclusions in this article but that percentage is real, you could check it in another tests, articles, whatever ..)
The percentage value looks bad but how much is that in absolute terms? Using the figures from the article, wireless charging uses 6.75 Wh more per full charge. Assuming you charge that much every day, that's 2.46 kWh per year, or 42 cents at average US electricity prices[1]. I think that's a price worth paying for the convenience.
Maybe it is, but we are talking about the Fairphone. A phone that the company pitches as more eco-friendly than the competition. Lacking a feature that is known to be wasteful in terms of energy is fitting.
Maybe it is negligible, but I suspect that in the grand scheme of things, the whole "fair trade" thing is negligible too, it didn't stop the company from building on that. At least, it sends a good message.
Given the cost of the “wasted” electricity I think it’s reasonable to say that charging with wires could easily be more wasteful. All it takes is just that wireless charging saves ONE broken/worn-out component, and it’ll easily have saved the world an equivalent amount of resources. If it’s a screen (like cause someone accidentally pulls on the charging cable dropping the phone to the floor), it could equate to several phones over several years. Maybe you are careful, but others aren’t.
One giant caveat though: wireless charging could wear out the battery faster due to the heat generated. But fast charging over cable is also bad for the battery, and that’s becoming increasingly common. At least wireless is always slow charging
What’s the environmental cost of USB charging assuming wear on the cable? I seem to naturally go through one per year, I have a friend whose pets love to destroy cables so I assume they go through more.
Electricity can be solar, meaning that it could be close enough to zero environmental impact - think 20 years from now when we’ve got our crap together when it comes to sustainable energy..
Edit: a point below comments on increased battery wear which I fully agree with.
But usually, people don't travel with their wireless chargers, or if they do, their wireless charger wire will get the same bad treatment as their phone charging cable.
As for wear on the phone side, the good thing of having a Fairphone is that it is easily replaceable. But USB-C ports are also designed to be more robust than the cable. So unless there is a defect, it should last the life of the phone.
Sadly in practice the USB-C port still is one of the weakest parts of the phone. When it becomes too loose / mushy / unreliable, and cleaning it does not help, and replacing it is not economical, then that's it for the phone.
I travel with cables every day. The only cables I've ever broken were due to some accident like tripping over it or something. I'm talking like 1 or 2 in my entire life. I have never considered cables to be a consumable part.
How on earth does someone get through one a year? Are you using it as a rope? Copper isn't cheap but should last decades, not one lousy year.
Cheap eBay cables seem to be extremely fragile inside, plastic splits often too. Weather conditions, general treatment and lifestyle will all have an impact.
I'm taking extra good care of the USB-C cable that came with my phone, because I know that USB-C standard is a mess and I don't trust the standard to be able to find a replacement that allows the extra fast charging. I've had it for 4.5 years now.
>> 1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger.
Sure, but compared to everything else we use, smartphones use almost no energy. The one I'm typing this on has a battery capacity of 12 wh; if you have a resistive electric water heater, standing in a hot shower during the winter for an extra second would offset half of that.
This nerd sniped me and I had to do the math to confirm, but you're right, at least depending on where you get your estimates and regional power costs. The energy equivalent between a cell phone and shower time is on the order of seconds.
My phone's battery is 4385 mAh @3.7V, or 0.016 kWh, and my power costs $0.1252/kWh, or about $0.002 per phone charge. Based on some super surface-level estimates from googling, a typical shower is about 2 gallon/min, and the cost to heat water is about $0.01-0.02 per gallon, meaning for me it's actually about 4 seconds of hot water per phone charge.
And the parent comment said “47% wasted power … extra second … would offset half of that” and 47% of four seconds is about two, half of that is one second, so I’d say that was shockingly accurate, wow!
Yeah, the math I did was for heating water by 50 kelvins for a 9 l/min showerhead, which in hindsight was probably overestimating it. It'd make sense if the actual answer for most people was 2-4 seconds
Did see an interesting thing recently about mist showers. You run them hotter than a normal shower, but they also use significantly less water, and therefore energy. That's always something to consider.
But the lower amount of water flowing will make it harder to remove soap suds from the hair, leading to longer shower times unless you like dandruff :) for me that's the longest part of showering.
> 1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger.
Lots of sibling replies pointing out that the absolute energy loss is negligible and reasonable price for the convenience.
That’s fine.
But there’s a bigger point. This convenience is being used as a justification for sticking with big brand phones. Which maybe tips the balance on the reasonableness, and, more broadly, raises the general issue of how much buying for convenience is a slippery slope. Maybe just charge with a cable?
If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery. With daily fast charging, I've seen phones chew through their battery in under a year.
Conversely, the rather slow charge rate of wireless helps extend battery life quite a lot. This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general, and limit my battery to 85% max charge. It's been three or four years and my battery is still at ~80% health.
Which is worse, wasting a small amount of power or trashing your phone's battery in a year or two? One has significantly higher monetary and environmental costs.
Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates.
I design switching converters and lithium charge circuits for my job. They're pretty great, but not nearly as good as you'd think.
>This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general
Wireless charging isn't a silver bullet either. It generates tons of waste heat, which is also bad for batteries. I'm also not sure why you're so against wired charging, especially since you have to go out of your way and pay a premium for fast charge capable chargers. If you buy a bog standard 5W/10W charger, you're not fast charging. If you plug your phone into your computer, you're likely getting slow charging (0.5A to 1A).
I'm not against wired charging per se, I just think wireless is better.
I use an extremely old wireless charging stand that doesn't even hit 500mA. It gets warm, but not hot. It takes all damn night to charge which suits me just fine.
That said, I agree with you, which is why I've explicitly disabled fast wireless charging. The heat is almost as bad as excessive charge current. Though both heat and excessive current together is much worse than either individually. Which is exactly what you get with super fast charging modes, and why I disable those modes.
Generally, phones ship with at least a 20W charger these days. It's fine, probably.
Really my whole deal here is that my phone has a non-replacable battery. Paying someone to crack it open and replace the battery would cost a lot more than I'm willing to pay. My goal is to preserve the battery for as long as I can so I don't have to trash the whole phone.
Ultimately, this is a decision made for myself based on my own professional experience with lithium batteries and associated electronics. I definitely wouldn't recommend everyone do everything I'm doing; it is a bit excessive. But that's just how I like to do things.
Yeah I disable all the fast charging modes too. Except when I really need them for a quick top-up. I think it's great to have the capability when needed but not something to use every day.
>go out of your way and pay a premium for fast charge capable chargers
If you're on the road and using your laptop's USB-C charger to charge your phone then it'll easily supply enough power for the fastest charge mode of any phone.
Yeah, it could supply 60W or even more. But it won't, because most people who care about this stuff set both the charging rate limit and max battery percentage limit in the phone's settings and don't worry about it anymore.
> Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates.
The costs of wireless are on top of all of the costs of wired. You're not getting away from battery management just because you're using the air as a very inefficient cable.
> If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery.
I don't know about other Android phones, but Google's Pixel line of phones will do a slow charge overnight and time the top off to be in line with your morning alarm. So, my thought is that effort is being made here to extend battery life by specifically not fast charging overnight.
That's a pretty good feature and would significantly decrease battery wear. I'm actually surprised it's implemented in the Pixel, it should be a core feature of Android
In my experience, the best battery care measure is to get a phone with a good battery...
I bought a Huawei P30 Pro in early 2019, never took care of preserving the battery, always used fast charging (which is very fast in that phone, 40 W). 4 years later, the battery is still going strong (now the phone belongs to my wife).
On the other hand, I bought a Pixel 6 Pro in early 2021. From the beginning, I saw that the battery barely lasted a day of heavy usage, so I was more careful (trying to never get below 20%, deactivating 5G, etc.), plus the phone charges slower (around 20 W, I think) and has built-in charge planning to charge slower overnight. Even with all that, two years later, the battery is absolute crap. If I'm going to use the phone frequently (e.g. when travelling) I need an external battery to last though the day.
> Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger.
The energy waste is a shame, but the convenience factor is mighty high, not to mention the wear and tear on your USB-C port is non-existent. Maybe one point for less USB cable waste and tossing perfectly good phones just because their USB ports are damaged?
Your point on wireless-charging waste is valid, but I'm not sure a hypothetical initiative to reduce national electricity consumption should prioritize addressing it. The waste is similar to using a 7-watt LED bulb one hour extra per day (16Wh phone battery requires an extra 47% or 7.52 watts to charge wirelessly from 0% to 100% each night).
The concern about wireless inefficiency is very well-placed, however, in the case of electric cars. EVs will become an enormous consumer of electricity in the near future, so small changes now can have a big cumulative effect. "Charge your car as conveniently as your phone" would be an effective marketing tagline, so to that extent I agree that phones set a bad example for needless energy consumption in the name of convenience.
(edit: oops, bunch of other commenters made the same point while I was writing mine)
> The concern about wireless inefficiency is very well-placed, however, in the case of electric cars.
I don't think so. For one, with EVs you are paying pretty directly for the charge and nearly 50% extra for the hassle of not plugging in the cable seems excessive. For a charging station it would probably be more profitable to hire someone to plug your car in instead of going wireless, even disregarding the setup cost.
But, more importantly, fast wireless charging generates heat. This is fine for the miniscule amount of energy in phones, but would probably pose a serious problem with the wattage involved in changing EVs. We're currently at the point of having charging cables with integrated cooling, the inefficiency of wireless would likely either cook the car or limit the speed too much to be viable ("charge your car as conveniently as your phone, in a meager three days!").
Qi receivers on phones don't wear out as fast as physical connectors do. There are no hard reasons why wireless is better in durability but practically they tend to be more reliable.
I've had three phones' (two Nexus 5Xs, one Samsung S21) USB-C ports fail on me unexpectedly, and without wireless charging suddenly I can't charge the phone. I'm unlikely to buy a phone without wireless charging for that reason.
In a similar vein, my Nexus 7's microUSB port died and I continued using it for years with wireless charging. Not really a common feature on tablets anymore
Yikes. I've had multiple laptop and phone power connectors flake out gradually but never so far suddenly. I just got my first USB-C phone because my old micro USB one was crapping out among other things. I'm gradually migrating from the old phone to the new. That would be much more hassle if the old phone was totally unable to charge. Now I'm worrying about USB-C, ugh.
I've only experienced gradual failures so far, which give me time to fix or migrate. Sudden failure is harder to deal with. Wireless charging plus replaceable batteries would be a perfect combo.
This 2016 article puts the cost of charging an ipad at $1.55 per year (iphone lower but I assume batteries got bigger or time). 47% wastage with wireless chrome is not much in terms of energy costs. https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charg...
> Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger.
That's also the main reason I'm not interested in wireless charging. A wire works fine, and it seems pretty obvious to me that wireless can never be as efficient. But I never had exact support for this belief, so thank you for that.
> Totally agree with that, if camera is fundamental for you maybe not the right choice.
With their modular approach, it would be nice if you could buy a better camera for it. I know that suggestion has been around since Fairphone 2, so I guess there must be a good reason why they're not doing that.
But if Fairphone was popular enough, I bet there would be a massive aftermarket for such upgrades.
That is an excellent point. Ports are always vulnerable.
On the other hand, it seems that wireless charging is also the reason why many modern phones have these stupidly fragile glass backs. So your whole phone gets more vulnerable.
I don't buy it. Pixel 5 did have a kinda metallic-plastiky back (sort of plastic around wireless c, but it was impossible to spot the area with naked eye), it looked nice. You also can see the zenfone 10, it's some sort of plastic, but super nice to the touch. Having glass back is not mandatory for a wireless charging phone, I think companies do this to make more profit on repairs longterm
> Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger.
TBH some wired chargers are only 60 percent efficient in converting AC to DC. Then you'll also have energy losses inside the phone converting 5vdc to 3.7vdc for the lithium battery.
But, what? this is ~7 watts per charge completely full charge?
One could do the following and offset those 7 watts with a lot more to spare:
I'll add to your list of fairphone shortcomings the lack of a headphone jack. I really don't buy their excuse that including one would make the phone too large to be commercially viable.
I couldn't say... most likely they just don't see it as a priority, but I'm sure that not including one lowers their costs and takes less effort which could be a motivator.
Same. I've been extremely resistant to any device without a headphone jack. I don't get this weird obsession with removing them. Apple made the idiotic decision originally because they have this weird air of "knowing better than you" but what I don't get is why other manufacturers followed suit.
Then people in your household either (a) don't really use their phones that much or (b) get brand new phones with brand new batteries every year. There is no phone battery that lasts an entire day for a person that uses their >1yo phone a lot throughout the day.
I bought my phone before the covid pandemic and it is rarely below 50% when I go to bed.
The only thing that make it drain faster is if I use a lot the GPS but that is usually when I am travelling in a vehicule and in those rare cases it is plugged and charging while operating.
I think you have a social media addiction issue if you have to charge your phone several times a day.
Horseshit. I could charge my Pixel 5 once every other day, and I use it for photography as well as meme scrolling and messaging. If you're using your phone so much that it needs to be be charged twice a day then you're almost certainly using it in a way that's worse for your health than for the battery life. Or you're wasting a lot of battery life on background telemetry.
Do you use battery saver mode? I actually try not to fully charge my phone, but keep it between 30%-70%, which puts less strain on it, and battery saver kicks on at 50%.
Nah, I think someone just got addicted to adding "cool tech" to their house and is now locked in to phones with wireless charging. A lot of the smart home stuff seems to be like that.
"Supporting" sustainability, but you don't accept having to plug your phone once-a-day like 90% of smartphone owners, you want to have the best phone camera in your social group, and you don't want screen protectors.
I'm shocked we have come to this as a society. If you don't accept any compromises, just admit that you don't really care and move on.
Around Christmas time I always consider giving a family member one of my old smart phones. But then I remember I stopped using them because they got old and the battery life sucks.
My friend has a Pixel 7 (non Pro) and it takes pretty crappy photos for such a high-end phone. Shooting in RAW with all the hi-res options turned on. Anything that would help? Better camera app than the Google one?
1. This is like critiscizing a green energy company for not burning oil.
Wireless charging is antithetical to any sustainable device mission. In terms of "last mile delivery", wireless charging for small personal devices is about the least efficient, highest energy waste delivery method there is. I'm talking orders of magnitude more waste versus production than coal, oil, propane, wale blubber, wood. That isn't even to say the effect on your battery or surrounding plastics/membranes.
2. Do you purchase a cell phone in 2023 with "Camera quality" in mind? Not trying to be rude, I'm actively sampling this query. I can't understand this and haven't since modern smart phones proliferated. No matter the phone, set it to raw, take photo ,edit in post. Comes out leagues better than any ios, pixel etc photo. and I don't know who is taking so many photos and comparing them to care.
3. The accessory case is a criticism is a bit more valid but come on.
THis phone is losing money on every sale. If they sell one of these cases for every phone, they MAY come out ahead because as you said, the cases are cheap junk. Don't buy the case if this is a problem. This last years, apple switched from leather cases to "vegan leather". Same cost, made in china. More than the cost of this fair phone case.
I feel like if you own a framework, you should understand that the criticisms you listed are.....not criticisms and are in fact features or obvious requirements for a loss-leading edge case device. There is no 100 percent, perfect, sustainable mobile device like there is for workstations, because the walled garden of mobile devices is unfortunatley just more rigidly architectured.
> 2. Do you purchase a cell phone in 2023 with "Camera quality" in mind? Not trying to be rude, I'm actively sampling this query. I can't understand this and haven't since modern smart phones proliferated. No matter the phone, set it to raw, take photo ,edit in post. Comes out leagues better than any ios, pixel etc photo. and I don't know who is taking so many photos and comparing them to care.
The whole idea of smartphone cameras is that nobody is editing RAWs. I have issues with the GP comment but wanting a high quality camera is not one of them. Taking decent-to-great smartphone photos, whether inane or artistic, is a staple of modern life. (Although it sounds more like a status thing in their case, like they don't want someone else in their social group to be the go-to photographer? Maybe it was just not worded clearly.)w
People preferring this phone's photos is just evidence that it actually takes better snapshots, rather than me being biased about my own tech choices. Wrangling a bunch of parents and children for a photo is hard enough. I like knowing that the camera won't be yet another reason why we need to wrangle everyone twice rather than just once.
(Fully agreed on the RAW thing. Photography for me isn't a hobby; it's just a way for the family to remember what everyone looked like last Thanksgiving, preferably not with someone's face silhouetted by poor lighting.)
1. No wireless charging. Switching to this phone would require a big change in my household's ecosystem (sorry to use a big word for a small thing, but I can't think of a better one). We have $10 wireless charging discs all over the place, and it's nice to be able to charge whenever we set our phones down. I don't want to take a step backward.
2. The Verge's review suggests the camera is OK but not great. I've been taking Pixel photos for years, and my phone is always the one people ask to use for group shots at social events. I don't want to fuss with taking a picture ten times just to get the lighting right, and the Pixel almost always meets the bar on the first shot. It sucks that a consumption device like a phone has this one critical input feature, and that there is still so much of a computational photography gap between certain brands and the rest, but that's how it is, and it prevents me from seriously considering any of them. (This isn't unique to Pixel; I hear Apple does well in this area, too.)
3. Just a nit: why is the case 40 euros? I expect to pay a premium for the phone because of the specific compromises in the design and the resulting low volumes. But this is just another run-of-the-mill TPU case that I expect I'd have to routinely replace every couple years. I don't use screen protectors, but I have an even more allergic reaction to the 33-euro price of the one for sale. I know there are aftermarket options, but I'm already taking a risk of poor part/accessory availability in the future because it's a niche product, so I don't know whether they'll still be available when I need them years from now.
By the way, I do own a Framework laptop (11th-gen CPU), and I like it a lot. I plan to swap out the motherboard next year. Unlike the Fairphone, the Framework didn't impose cost and performance compromises right out of the gate. I support sustainability, but there's only so far I'm willing to go.