Looks like a new model for the Fairphone has been announced! What do you think about it?
Personally I love the fairphone project but after having tried GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6a it would be hard to move to a different OS
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JerryRigEverything already tested it and I’m impressed.
Just saw it. Wow. This device reminds me of my Framework.
As the owner of an FP4, I will not get any further FP products.
The hardware is mostly fine, but it’s also meh. The speaker sucks, the microphone sucks, the camera sucks. Just talking to people on the phone is a pain, since people just can’t understand me.
But worse is the software. Updates are slow (still no Android 13 on the FP4) and terribly buggy. Each update brings new bugs with it, old bugs are resolved only very slowly. One example of this is that some devices experience ghost touches. So in the newest update, they just lowered the sensitivity, so that the devices that didn’t have ghost touches before now often don’t register touch at all. On the forums there is a long list of known bugs. The weird thing here is that every user seems to get a random grab bag of bugs.
And lastly: There is the price. It’s so incredibly expensive, that it basically invalidates any benefit you get from the repairability. If I buy a comparable phone for ~€400 less, I can use that money to get the battery and screen professionally replaced a few times.
So all in all, I am really not happy with the FP4, and this will most likely be my last Fairphone, unless Fairphone will finally migrate their software development to an in-house team where the devs actually use the phone themselves. Software QA is so terrible, that I can’t imagine anyone at Fairphone actually using the phone themselves.
You could look into CalyxOS. I don’t know if you’d consider installing an alternative System on your phone, but the FP4 is one of the few ones that let you unlock and relock the bootloader. Mine has been on Android 13 for a while now with very few software issues.
Newbiwe here, do you need to flash rom every time CalyxOS receives an update?
Not at all. It has OTA updates that download and install automatically in the background, and apply on the next reboot.
I honestly wonder why people suggest all these weird lineage spinoffs instead of the real thing… oh well
Well when you install CalyxOS you can relock the bootloader afterwards, it comes with microg, which vanilla Lineage dodn’t support at all last time I checked, and it comes with a firewall app as well. So, different focus than Lineage I’d say.
There definitely are bugs. But to be fair, for every phone I ever owned the forum looked the same: so many people complaining about so many different problems/bugs/hardware issues that you question why you even bought the phone in the first place. Most often the average user is perfectly fine but would never open up a forum post to announce this.
The Fairphone is always just such an odd decision for me. On one hand, I would love to have a phone with long support and swappable parts. On the other hand, I hear so many complaints about the software and wait for major version updates that I am not enterily sure if it really is a good buy.
The price is pretty okay, a bit less than 100€ per expected usable year. This is in line with other manufacturers. Also, the biggest bull of the expenses probably comes from the way the manufacturing and materials are checked.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Or maybe there will be less issues this time? From what I heard some of the problems where caused by Qualcomms support windows being closed and the company actually updating everything themself. Which might be solved by using a SoC with somewhat decent support now.
the biggest bull of the expenses probably comes from the way the manufacturing and materials are checked.
Could you expand on this? I am unfamiliar with Fairphone’s methods for determining and checking sources for materials and manufacturing. Is it flawed?
As far as I know, Fairphone uses “conflict free” materials. This is more expensive and harder to get than just searching for the cheapest seller of any material (e.g. lithium) and just going with them. In theory this should help against child or prison labor.
Additionally, they aim to pay everyone in the chain a living wage. Which is also more expensive than just using foxxcon to produce as cheap as possible and telling them to “just add more suicide prevention nets”.
This is a good thing, but makes cost go up quite a bit I would assume. Additionally, the SoC is probably more expensive than the Snapdragon equivalent, as it is build “for industrial uses”, which normally commands a premium.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Custom ROM will help with some issues, but not all. If the issue is in a proprietary blob, like the random screen dimming issue that’s plagued FP4 for months now, you’d still be stuck with the issue.
8 years support
Wow. I wonder if they have a contract with Qualcomm for that.
No, what they did was pick an SoC called QCM6490 which is used for embedded and industrial applications, and Qualcomm officially supports those for 8 years, unlike the snapdragon SoCs. According to gsmarena it should have performance similar to a snapdragon 778G.
Yeah, just read about it. That said Qualcomm’s part of the support is said to be 5 years by Ron at Ars:
Let’s talk about that industry-leading 8–10 years of Android support, which doesn’t necessarily mean 8–10 major OS updates. For now, Fairphone is promising “at least five operating system upgrades” because that is how long its weird Qualcomm chipset will officially be supported. Fairphone says Qualcomm will support that chip “until 2028” and after that, “Fairphone commits to extend support until 2031 and is aiming for 2033, giving users a total of eight to ten years of software support.”
According to Fairphone “We plan at least 5 Android OS version updates after Android 13”.
5 years is good, but not exceptional. And security fixes is way more fuzzy topic.
Is there an SD slot?
I just read the specs and there is an SD slot.
I’m not sure but it seems there isn’t…
Just out of curiosity what would you use/need it for?
…storage?
O rly?
Duh, penile storage that is
Music mostly. I have over a terabyte of FLAC files stored on my home NAS and whilst I do have a Navidrome instance setup to stream it all, it’s not as reliable as just playing locally.
Fair enough. Does a phone have a good enough chip to play FLAC to it’s full strength?
I’m guessing they mean microSD and would like to use it for additional storage
Apps, scheduled backups, photos, offline maps, music.
Would rather not store most things on the device NAND as it has a finite shelf life
What’s the shelf life of the NAND? Thought it was sth like 10 years
In theory, but phones do soooo much with the NAND that I think it varies quite largely.
I’ve struggled to get more than 3-5 years out of my devices, and its seemed to be the NAND causing the failure in my limited experience
My galaxy S4 failed after two years and would go straight into firmware flashing mode when connected to a computer. Leading up to this, it was reallllyyyy slow. I eventually narrowed this down to the internal storage, and moved my apps to the SD card where things sped up again. It would also frequently reboot.
My Galaxy S5 (RIP 🤧) failed after a good 6 year run, now it goes straight to recovery with
MMC_READ failedsadlyOn the opposite end of things I’ve got an old Android 4 tablet from 2013 that still works perfectly fine, although I don’t really have any reason to use it, it’s kinda just existing as a time capsule.
Thanks for sharing your experience :) Glad I never had such issues with my devices, but I guess it heavily depends on the specific device and the usecases.
My current Op 7 Pro has also been running without a problem. But in case it happens I know what might be the cause
What’s the deal with phones never having a 16:9 aspect ratio anymore?
I suspect that if you were to cut the screen at the rounded edges, the sensor island and the onscreen nav buttons you’ll be left with a 16:9 screen.
In other words its a 16:9 screen with some margin for curves and controls.
Smartphones technology progress is slowed down recently, but still, do you think that this phone will be usable in 8 years?
If you are used to it, probably. I know that my pixel 4a is slowing down after 3 years. But I am just used to the speed, so it is okay for me.
I don’t really feel that my 4a slowed down, but the battery is degraded for sure. Battery life was never amazing, but now it’s just bad. So this is why I am looking at the Fairphone: If I could just swap my battery easily, I would just continue using my 4a.
The battery on my 4a is down to 66% capacity.
It does feel slower with newer apps, as those need more power.
Yes. This is more or less my view as well. it could be technically usable in 8 years, but very few people would accept this experience.
And I do not think that a noticeable percentage of fearphones 5 will be in use in 7 years.
Kudos on Fairphone for offering 8 years of software updates.
As an owner of FP4, my biggest gripes with the FP4 are the software updates. Bugs keep languishing for months before they are acknowledged and then months pass before the bugs are fixed. Three annoying issues with my FP4 that I deal with on a daily basis:
- Screen dimming bug. First reported in Feb and the earliest possible fix is in October. My phone is useless when I’m out and about and the level of urgency implied by FP4 for this issue baffles me.
- NFC stops working randomly
- 5 GHz hotspot was broken for months and only fixed recently
I don’t care much about Android 13 as long as I get timely security patches. What I want is a bug free experience and that’s something FP4 fails to deliver.
An annoying hardware decision is the SIM card can’t be hot swapped. Not sure why this wasn’t addressed with FP5.
GSMarena reports displayport support in the USB.
Can anyone confirm this? The site doesn’t mention it and it’s a game changing feature imo.
@shaked_coffee I wanted to buy the Fairphone in December, when I had to (somewhat) urgently change my phone. The fact that it’s priced really high for just being repairable makes little sense. In the end, even though I did not want to stay on Nokia, I purchased a Nokia G22 and I couldn’t be happier.
It’s better to buy three used phones that are more powerful and cheaper and keep those out of the landfill than a fairphone.
I know this philosophy has to start somewhere but it’s just bad from a value, performance and supported accessories view.
Just buy a used Fairphone 5 then in a few years? That’s what I’m gonna do I think. This one is powerful enough imo
Bingo, we should try to buy used rather than new to impact ewaste rates.
Isn’t GrapheneOS supported on Fairphone as well?
No, only pixel.
No graphene OS support, they rely on some secure isolation hardware feature only found on Google Tensor chips, unique to Pixel phones
Fairphone officially has e/OS (Murena??) , but there are a few unofficial alternatives too
Ah alright. Thanks for the clarification
calyx os
Their phones are underpowered for the prices they charge.
