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199

Fairphone 5 Announced! (shop.fairphone.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Newbiwe here, do you need to flash rom every time CalyxOS receives an update?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not at all. It has OTA updates that download and install automatically in the background, and apply on the next reboot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly wonder why people suggest all these weird lineage spinoffs instead of the real thing.. oh well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] fubbernuckin 3 points 1 year ago

In terms of the price, to be fair, it's supposed to last like 8 years. You're basically buying your next phone too when you buy one of these. It's also more expensive to do what they're doing.