Technology

Its mediocre camera is a deal breaker for me. Camera is the most important phone feature to me

The FairPhone 4 had a screen brightness bug that made the phone (mostly) unusable outside in the sun that lasted from Feb 2023 to Oct 2023.
Since the Android 12 update, the FP4 has a cooling feature that reduces the maximum brightness even when the slider is all the way to the right.
This occurs when the phone heats up to ~40 degrees at the CPU, which is not a lot at all.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/random-screen-dimming-while-brightness-slider-stays-at-100-after-a12-update/93195

They will have to work very hard to make me consider buying my next phone from them.
They do seem to listen to their users and learn from their mistakes though - FP4 was often criticized for the short firmware support offered from Qualcomm. FP5 will have Qualcomm's extended firmware support for its SoC.
https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Press_release_Fairphone_5.pdf

This is the best summary I could come up with:

There are those who are happy to be in the market for a new device, who delight in discovering how phones have improved since they last upgraded and who can’t wait to reap the benefits of better low-light camera performance, a prettier display, and more premium build quality.

They’re the people who respond with despair when they’re told that their phone has reached the end of its software support period or that it’s no longer cost-effective to repair a seemingly minor hardware fault.

But now the phone comes equipped with technological advancements such as a modern OLED display with a high refresh rate, more robust waterproofing, and a higher-capacity battery.

To that end, there are actually more individually accessible modules this time around, which is nice if you, say, only need to replace one rear camera that’s broken or swap out a faulty SIM card tray.

That’s better than the IP54 rating of the Fairphone 4 (which was still resilient enough for me to use throughout an exceptionally rainy hike), but it still falls short of allowing you to fully immerse the device in water like you can do with an IP68-rated phone.

In low light, the phone produces superficially nice shots, but peer a little closer, and it looks like this is the work of aggressive processing, with a lot of fine detail smoothed out and colors artificially boosted.

The original article contains 1,968 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Headphone jack?

I'm in the market for a phone and love this idea, but 8x digital zoom without optical zoom options in 2024 is a non-starter for me.

No headphone jack means fairphone now encourage Bluetooth earbuds and electronic waste.

They're dead to me.