I’ve been looking into potentially switching to an alternative smart phone, something like the Jolla phone with sailfish OS, the fairphone, etc. I think something like that would be excellent for what I want my smart phone to do, and I’m tired of the one I have. However from what I’ve read online, they don’t really seem to work well in the USA. I am on T mobile which seems to work better than other providers, but I was wondering if any of the fine people on Lemmy have actual experience they can share.
i learned the hard way that tmobile won’t allow chinese phones on their pre-paid plans so be sure to account for that.
I just get used Pixel phones and put Lineage OS on them, or Graphene if thats more you vibe. I would love to one day move to some a more open and repairable phone but the US market just does not seem interested.
Now that Android is holding back open source Android releases, I want to switch to some kind of Linux phone. It’s a shame that there are no Linux phones with a mainline kernel that are fully functional and not extremely slow (looking at you, Pinephone and Librem 5), though.
And Halium is just a stopgap, since it essentially uses an Android kernel and drivers, meaning the kernel will eventually be EOL after the long term support for that version runs out.
The latest fairphone supports all of the TMobile 4g LTE bands and n2, n41, and n71 on 5g. Mmwave is not a thing on the fairphone.
The new Jolla phone is unknown on that support. Hopefully it’s about as good as fairphone.
That said, if you buy it through Murena it should just work and be activatable like any normal Android phone. Also holy shit it’s expensive through Murena.
You already mentioned it but Fairphone + TMobile/Mint is a decent combo. The phone itself is fine with /e/. The only downside is the pictures/videos are not the greatest. I would recommend getting an actual camera/something a bit better if that is important to you.
I get the same coverage as my old stock android phone so its not a huge difference. I got the Fairphone 4 because the parts are easier to come by. They update the software ever month or so. No problems so far.
