![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tell me about smartphones?
My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S II, but it is now damaged beyond economic repair[0]. So I need a new one. Desiderata:
The apps I make most use of currently are the web-browser and email clients, the Met Office app, the torch, and the camera. I also use google maps (and navfree when abroad) and the ssh client, gstrings (a tuner app), the wifi analyser, a metronome, UnTappd, and the Good Beer Guide. After an initial flurry of game-playing (I played a lot of PvZ, and some Archipelago), I seem to have largely stopped.
The things that have annoyed me about this phone are mostly the google apps that you can't remove, and then have filled up some special storage for updates so I can't download updates any more, even though I have loads of space on my SD card and have moved all the apps I can there. The lack of an Android update (it's still on 4.1.2) recently leaves me a bit concerned about security, too.
I don't want to go iOS, which I think means I'm stuck with Android if I want anything resembling enough apps? Although presumably I could install cyanogen-mod (is that plausibly safe these days?). There are Ubuntu phones, but I think they don't really have apps to cover my use cases?
The obvious replacement would be a Galaxy 6 or 7, although they are a bit larger. Any other things I should be looking at?
[0] screen is cracked, and repair is about £150, which for a 4-year-old phone is daft (I could get a new S 2 for that!)
- Not much bigger than my current phone (125.3x66.1x8.49mm) so it still fits in my pockets!
- Android or similar (see below)
- Decent camera
- Easy to transfer files to Linux (Kies Air works quite well; jmtpfs isn't bad in Debian squeeze)
- Not vastly expensive
- Available unlocked
- Will get plausible updates
The apps I make most use of currently are the web-browser and email clients, the Met Office app, the torch, and the camera. I also use google maps (and navfree when abroad) and the ssh client, gstrings (a tuner app), the wifi analyser, a metronome, UnTappd, and the Good Beer Guide. After an initial flurry of game-playing (I played a lot of PvZ, and some Archipelago), I seem to have largely stopped.
The things that have annoyed me about this phone are mostly the google apps that you can't remove, and then have filled up some special storage for updates so I can't download updates any more, even though I have loads of space on my SD card and have moved all the apps I can there. The lack of an Android update (it's still on 4.1.2) recently leaves me a bit concerned about security, too.
I don't want to go iOS, which I think means I'm stuck with Android if I want anything resembling enough apps? Although presumably I could install cyanogen-mod (is that plausibly safe these days?). There are Ubuntu phones, but I think they don't really have apps to cover my use cases?
The obvious replacement would be a Galaxy 6 or 7, although they are a bit larger. Any other things I should be looking at?
[0] screen is cracked, and repair is about £150, which for a 4-year-old phone is daft (I could get a new S 2 for that!)
no subject
Are there ethical problems with Fairphone beyond their choosing Qualcomm hardware (and so making running a free OS impossible)?
no subject
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.)