I haven’t used my phone’s USB port for anything but charging for at least over a decade so I hadn’t even checked the port speed before or after buying.
I back up my important images to an external SSD because I don’t want to rely on cloud backup, plus I shuffle around quite a few audiobooks, game roms and ebook collections from time to time. Having faster speeds with that does add up.
I also use Desktop mode quite a lot (my previous phone was a Moto G100 so it had Moto Ready For) and now that a universal Desktop mode is announced for Android 16 I would be quite annoyed if I couldn’t use it just due to hardware limitation. The current Desktop mode preview on GrapheneOS isn’t 100% functional yet either, but at least I know that I will get it working eventually 😄
Was the downgrade to USB-C 2.0 noticeable to you so far? As in, with the slower data transfer speed or lack of Display output?
It’s the main reason why I ended up going with a Pixel 9 pro instead of Fairphone 6 when getting a new phone a few months ago
USB 2 ? no way. My camera backups would take weeks on USB 2 speeds. Probably faster over local network
I haven’t used my phone’s USB port for anything but charging for at least over a decade so I hadn’t even checked the port speed before or after buying.
Wait wtf. This kills transfer speeds to portable SSDs.
Lame-ass decision, welp, never considering a fairphone untill they start making better decisions.
What is the use-case for fast USB transfer to/from a smart phone?
Are you using your phone as a computing platform / data transfer device? Just honestly curious why this is a showstopper for you.
I use my phone as my main computer.
In fact, most people don’t really have a desktop/laptop computer anymore, its just their one smartphone
I back up my important images to an external SSD because I don’t want to rely on cloud backup, plus I shuffle around quite a few audiobooks, game roms and ebook collections from time to time. Having faster speeds with that does add up.
I also use Desktop mode quite a lot (my previous phone was a Moto G100 so it had Moto Ready For) and now that a universal Desktop mode is announced for Android 16 I would be quite annoyed if I couldn’t use it just due to hardware limitation. The current Desktop mode preview on GrapheneOS isn’t 100% functional yet either, but at least I know that I will get it working eventually 😄
How many people transfer files from a phone to a portable SSD? Not that many. That’s also probably why the feature was cut in the first place.
Fun Fact: The FP5 (predecessor) has USB3 but it’s effectively useless for file transfer as the internal storage has USB2 like speeds.
Ethernet over USB, too
And even just regular file transfers. I got used to passing files over KDE Connect because fucking WiFi is faster than the USB 2.0 on my phone.
Unfortunately, only works with the “Share” or “Send to” rather than file browser which for some reason caps out at 5MB/s.