this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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I don't want a dumb phone. I want a circa 2014 smart phone that is not expected to replace my laptop and serve as a constant data stream for corporations. I want to be able to visit a website on my phone and not have it try to get me to download an app, be ads on 70% of the screen, or just be unreadable formatting. Let me call, text, do a basic online search, play a stupid flash game, and take my money. Stop being greedy and trying to make everything I do monetizable
Is fair phone (review) that? Its camera and battery are sub-par for the money, but it says that it makes up for it in many ways, like longevity and ability to swap out components that in other phones can mean almost getting a new one. It sounds kinda perfect for my use case but I've never owned one so can't be positive. When my current phone dies, this is something I'll heavily look into.
I have a Fairphone 5 and it's... ok. It's definitely overpriced for its specs but you can't really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It's also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that's why I switched), it's a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I'll pull it out of my pocket and it's mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn't appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I've had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn't allow you to open the keyboard again. It's also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that's probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.
The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don't expect the polish you'll get out of a Samsung flagship, you'll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don't regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn't really worth the money.
I can't comment on fairphone, but the Discord thing is likely not your phone, it's Discord or something. The same happens to me randomly on a Pixel 6a.
Never happened on my old phone. Might be some issue with the stock Android then, idk
As a fellow FP5 user, I haven't come across the issues you've mentioned - that said, I did install /e/os pretty much immediately, so perhaps that's why.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences - that should definitely help people!:-)
I wonder if they perhaps have some QA issues, so you got a lemon, or maybe the design itself is just that bad. You wouldn't necessarily know, I'm just musing out loud!:-P
One thing I do want to ask if you don't mind - b/c I don't know how to interpret the specs and I no longer trust paid reviewers - is how smooth does it handle? Like, noticeable lags or no? If it is basically a cheapie smartphone for a sub-flagship price, I might even be okay with that but wanted to know before getting into it.
Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.
And I wouldn't really call the design "that bad", I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.
So on a scale of 1-5, responsiveness might be a 4?
About the design, I mean like a poorly-placed power button that is easily triggered (and then whatever confirmation procedure is in place can be performed by your pocket), or the sudden drainage of battery issue could be something about poor Quality Assurance when they pick batteries at the factory to put into the devices prior to shipping them out. Or worse, you could replace the battery and that effect could still happen!?
I had a Nexus 5 that would dial things, like even emergency #s (fortunately I don't think it would actually do the call, just dial the numbers) while in my pocket - it may have had something to do with turning the screen on while a headphone jack was plugged into it. I replaced the OS for other reasons and that happened to solve that issue as well:-). So I would not turn a phone away for such a thing, especially if there is a software/configuration fix.
But responsiveness is as much due to hardware as software - e.g. if Firefox runs slow b/c it was compiled for and websites (even mobile) designed for higher-end specs.
Yeah, I'd say 4 is about right. And the power button is a bit recessed (it doubles as the fingerprint reader), so it's really hard to press it accidentally. I genuinely have no idea how it could randomly turn off in my pocket. As for the battery, I'm pretty confident it's a software issue. It's only happened twice in the 4 months I've owned the phone and a restart fixed it both times.
Thanks for the additional feedback!:-) That does greatly reassure me.
Since you said the phone would come right back on immediately thereafter, it sounds to me like it does not seem connected to the battery issue.
Unless the battery issue wasn't "really" a discharge but the sensor somehow being tricked into thinking that the battery was dying - in which case the phone likely shut down gracefully rather than risk a brown-out situation, but then when you powered it up later it realizes once again that it has battery.
But in a more normal scenario, if you have either tap-to-wake or if hitting the power button results in a screen prompt confirmation that does not require a fingerprint or PIN, and especially if you were walking or cycling or some such, then the screen likely rubbed up against your pocket lining and managed to cause the proper combination of actions to shut it off. It could not start up an app that way - that would need your login - but turning a device off usually requires lesser security.
Fortunately the latter may be possible to fix with a configuration setting or other software fix:-).
Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there's a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I've never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's likely it. Weirdly, turning off that feature may not make all that much of a difference, bc it's so incredibly rare, but if you don't need it - like a long press of the power button would do just as well, in the also rare event that you want to turn it off at all - then disabling that feature would give you peace of mind.
Either way, I'm glad I could help by giving you the idea of how to (maybe) fix it!:-)
The frequency of this issue happening probably varies per person like depending on pockets and usage patterns and such. Like nowadays when I go cycling I either put the phone into an attachment on the front of the bike, or after that broke I put it in my backpack, and either way it never randomly turned off. And in my old Nexus where the issue did happen, the headphone jack working to pull the phone up more than it would have done all on its own probably contributed. i.e., for some people it will never be a problem with their patterns, but if it is for you, then presuming that's it, disabling that power-off feature (if you can) should make you much more satisfied!:-)