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
Their phones are underpowered for the prices they charge.
I think it’s incredibly ironic that it’s made in China while being marketed as ethical.
China isn’t inherently unethical. Just because Apple’s Chinese factories contain suicide nets, doesn’t mean every Chinese factory does.
That take isn’t just ban it’s plain disgusting, please inform yourself before you spread shit like that!!!
This.
Also would like to add that Fairphone works very closely with the manufacturer for OS and firmware customisations after the product has launched, based on feedback from the forum, this can be for things like decreasing the minimum brightness to go even darker (proprietary blob driver, only the factory can to do this) and support for new Bluetooth codecs, as they’ve done for the FP3.
@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.
One of the reasons why I would buy a repairable phone is it’s reliability in the long run. For instance, my previous phone, a Nokia, had a broken USB-C port. Replacing it would be pretty hard to do myself, or expensive to let somebody else do it. And that is if you can find replacement parts at all. One of the main benefits of a phone like the Fairphone, is that I can just order a new port from the manufacturer for a low price, without any unexpected costs, and replace it in 15 minutes. I still have some photo’s on that phone because they were not automatically backed up. The Nokia also was pretty unusable even when it worked, because the software was borderline criminally bad. However, the bootloader was locked so I couldn’t change it.
buying a second ahnd flagship is also a great way to save a bit on the environment, but it’s won’t be as reliable, the condition of the battery will probably be worse and you’ll have to watch out that you don’t buy a phone that doesn’t get any updates anymore (or at least has a unlocked bootloader if you’re willing to flash a custom ROM)
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?
I honestly wonder why people suggest all these weird lineage spinoffs instead of the real thing… oh well
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.
calyx os
