I'm glad to see this. I'm strongly leaning towards a fairphone for when my current one dies.
AT&T/T-Mobile only is tough, but they have to start somewhere I'm sure. I've wanted a FairPhone for a number of years; maybe I'll accept shittier service (for my area) when my contract ends.
I'm using a T-mobile MVNO and the coverage has been great ever since they bought Sprint.
The first phone/carrier I got as an adult was an iPhone 4s from Sprint, and I basically didn't have service for 98% of the phone's life. Then again, the merger probably means a larger network overall.
They should also have a service agreement with Verizon, giving them at least some additional coverage; though I'm unsure how much 3P are discriminated at the tower.
So they designed a phone for the US audience only to leave out 33% of the US audience by not supporting Verizon towers... do they want to fucking fail here??
Verizon is very protective over their network and always has been. They used CDMA for years just to lock out outside competition amongst other walled garden bullshit. When they moved to GSM they still tried to lock their network to a whitelist of phone IMEIs they control. They do not want you to buy an unlocked phone from a brand they do not ~~get paid by to be put on the whitelist~~ support.
God I hate Verizon. I'm never touching their fucking service lol
AT&T started using a whitelist too at some point. T-Mobile is the last major carrier left to not care what phone you use.
Its a bribe? I wasnt aware of that. That fucking sucks.
Concur. But gotta look at the frequencies, there is a chance most Verizon /visible freqs are supported
Verizon doesn't support a lot of unlocked devices even sold from major manufacturers
That phone claiming US/western hemisphere support is laughable.
It supports T-Mobile native bands, but without more extensive band support, domestic roaming will not be the best. (Some LTEiRA markets T-Mobile can currently roam on Verizon thanks to the USCC acquisition, for example. No band 13, no go.)
I'd not really claim it supports AT&T either. It's missing band 14, 29, 30, 46, 48, n260, n261. It's also not on AT&T's list of supported phones: https://www.att.com/scmsassets/images/support/pdf/Devices-Working-on-ATT-Network.pdf
14 is basically the only way to get signal in markets where AT&T doesn't have 5 or 12 licenses, like 2/3 of Nebraska.
n260/n261 are big at venues, airports, etc. The lack of those mmWave bands will affect coverage in high-density locations on all three carriers.
Even if it did support Verizon, without band 13 in the modem, Verizon's low-band nationwide band, it'd be a mostly-brick.
All three carriers require some kind of certification to be allowed on carrier networks (which alone should be illegal as they do it as a tactic to control the phone market.) Not just Verizon. (Verizon, at least, has a web site of certified devices: https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase and it's quite broad.)
Ironically, it will probably work with Verizon, even the BlackBerry Key2 does without certification. It just falls back to a very basic profile for flip phones. They don't tend to actively block phones like AT&T does.
Basically, it's a T-Mobile-on-network-only phone. Things are going greeeeeat over at that carrier right now with the tens of thousands of layoffs and forcing customer plan changes even on grandfathered plans.
Can they sell larger size phones plz. I'll buy it
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