Fairphone make a lot of noise about how they're trying to source ethically mined metals and the like, and I've seen some reports (admittedly some time ago) about how they're better but not really that much better on that front than the major handset manufacturers.
Fairphone also make a lot of noise about their handsets being repairable, and the reports I've seen agree with that; iFixit in particular have sung the Fairphone's praises on this front (see their teardown (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523) if you're really interested). As a simple but illustrative example, loads of the connectors used in the Fairphone are pogo pins rather than simple press connectors – more expensive, but much more reliable if you're going to take your phone apart to make repairs, hack around with the hardware or just to be nosey.
As you say, they're using a Qualcomm SOC and Android, so it's in no way a completely free setup; it is, as ever, a balancing act. Nonetheless I think they're the closest I've seen to a free/libre handset that still has the weight of an active app developer community behind it, though.
The big catch is the price: €530 for 2GB RAM and a Snapdragon 801 SOC, versus (for example) the OnePlus 2 for £250 with 4GB RAM and a Snapdragon 810 SOC.
(I've also, via Wikipedia, just discovered SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/), which claims to be a much more free OS than Android, while including Android libraries to allow it to run Android apps. It doesn't appear to be currently available for the Fairphone, but this blog post (https://www.fairphone.com/2015/10/22/jolla-community-working-on-sailfish-os-for-the-fairphone-2/) implies it's something that the people behind both Sailfish and Fairphone are actively interested in and working on.)
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logmplus1.livejournal.com at 10:15pm on 30/03/2016![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fairphone also make a lot of noise about their handsets being repairable, and the reports I've seen agree with that; iFixit in particular have sung the Fairphone's praises on this front (see their teardown (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523) if you're really interested). As a simple but illustrative example, loads of the connectors used in the Fairphone are pogo pins rather than simple press connectors – more expensive, but much more reliable if you're going to take your phone apart to make repairs, hack around with the hardware or just to be nosey.
As you say, they're using a Qualcomm SOC and Android, so it's in no way a completely free setup; it is, as ever, a balancing act. Nonetheless I think they're the closest I've seen to a free/libre handset that still has the weight of an active app developer community behind it, though.
The big catch is the price: €530 for 2GB RAM and a Snapdragon 801 SOC, versus (for example) the OnePlus 2 for £250 with 4GB RAM and a Snapdragon 810 SOC.
(I've also, via Wikipedia, just discovered SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/), which claims to be a much more free OS than Android, while including Android libraries to allow it to run Android apps. It doesn't appear to be currently available for the Fairphone, but this blog post (https://www.fairphone.com/2015/10/22/jolla-community-working-on-sailfish-os-for-the-fairphone-2/) implies it's something that the people behind both Sailfish and Fairphone are actively interested in and working on.)