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
JerryRigEverything already tested it and I’m impressed.
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.
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.
Looks preety good, i think i’ll have to swim to Europe to get one…
No headphone jack. I really wish they’d bring that back.
