Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?
In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/24463093338898-The-Fairphone-Gen-6-FAQ
I just checked my phone and the up/down speed for files is roughly 40MB/s despite having a USB 3 connection.
USB 2 has a max. transfer rate (under optimal conditions) of 60MB/s, so I think when the phone storage improves a bit or the cable is a bit longer it will likely become a bottleneck.
Also note that there are other applications than transfering files which might need more bandwidth.
To be fair it really doesn’t make much of a difference but USB 3 is now the standard for a century and has been around since 2008 so I somewhere expect a 600€ phone to also have it.
Compared to the Fairphone 5 it has some improvements but also a few downsides:
Pro:
Con:
My conclusion: Overall the improvements are ok, however just releasing the Fairphone 5 with a newer SoC might have been the better/more cost effective choice. Sacrificing display resolution for 120 Hz feels also quite wrong. 600€ is very pricy for a phone like this. Cutting some premium features away like the 120 Hz display or a bit of RAM and storage (that you can extend anyway with an SD card) might have saved enough to get the launch price down to somewhere near 500€ which would make it accessible for a wider audience.
Would be funny to know how the supposed 14TWh savings compare to the cost required to introduce/maintain these labels. And by costs I mean overall costs with everything related to it.
… optimise the use and recycling of critical raw materials
Does anyone have an idea how this helps with recycling?
They have 5 models listed for Google
Touché. However this doesn’t change the fact that the interface is absolutely useless.
When I’m searching for Google I just get the model ids:
None of these phones have the word “Pixel” anywhere and I have to look the market name up on a 3rd party website.
It’s hundreds of cycles. So 1500 cycles.
Seriously? Maybe they should include the unit of measurement or just print two extra zeros.
Again these points just highlight that this utterly unusable for a normal user.
Whilst I get the idea the implementation is currently unusable:
So I filtered for “Battery user-replacable” and found 117 smartphones (out of ~500). This is a straight up lie because all these phones are glued together (nearly all are IP68) meaning that you need some special tools.
It lacks a lot of phone models. I couldn’t find any Google Pixel or Fairphone.
The “Battery endurance in cycles” (number of charge/discharge cycles a battery can withstand until its usable electrical capacity has reached 80 % of its rated capacity) attribute is completely broken: It never seems to exceed 15? I had phones for years that withstood hundreds/thousands of battery cycles and the battery still nearly behaved like it’s new and you’re telling me the maximum number is 15??? Did you guys just stop testing after 15?
Also “with regard to energy labelling” what is this labelling about? Energy? Ok then why are there values about the phones “Repeated free fall reliability” or IP protection inside there?
The whole thing looks way to intransparent and useless for the average phone buyer and definetly needs some improvement…
General labelling about repairability/phone lifetime (e.g. receives updates for X years, replacement parts are avilable for X years, can install another OS, can replace battery without external tools, etc) without a overall score that merges all aspects would be a lot better and useful IMHO.
A yes, a public dns resolver funded by taxpayers money and nothing of it is open source…
Sounds like a massive waste of money to me. Just give someone like Mullvad (they already have a DNS service that is open source) that money instead of trying to be another shitty DNS Resolver.
Also the company behind this looks incredibly scummy and their products are mostly buzzword-bullshit. The whole company is based on selling a DNS blocklist for as much money as possible.
Also: https://www.whalebone.io/aura-for-consumers
People want to be safe online. They are even willing to pay for it. They just want their telco to offer them a smooth way to get there. Common cybersecurity products struggle with low adoption rates due to the need for downloads. Whalebone Aura requires no installation or updates and activates with a single click.
That’s sounds a lot like the ISP is implementing some kind of deep network inspection “to protect you from the internet”… aka censoring.
Check that “Filter lists > Privacy > Block outsider intrusion into LAN” is enabled and you should be fine
You can already do that:
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxApp" | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider" | Remove-AppxPackage -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI" | Remove-AppxPackage
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\GameBar" -Name "AutoGameModeEnabled" -Type DWord -Value 0
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\System\GameConfigStore" -Name "GameDVR_Enabled" -Type DWord -Value 0
If (!(Test-Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR")) {
New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR" | Out-Null
}
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR" -Name "AllowGameDVR" -Type DWord -Value 0
You’re welcome
I don’t want to say anything against their efforts because competition in a market is always great, but their product pricing and setup is just laughable.
Example: 4vCPU 16GB RAM Instance
For who is the pricing designed? Super big companies where management is dumb enough to buy that crap? “We have to host there because our companies CEO knows their CEO” situations?
There are a ton of other EU companies that get the job done a lot better.
I also found out a few other things that have changed:
IMHO this is kind of a downgrade in repairability as you now need custom tools (not everyone has a T5 screwdriver at home). Moving the volume buttons to the other side is also kind of weird and unexpected as most (non Apple) phones have them on the right…