JerryRigEverything already tested it and I'm impressed.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Android
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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 ~β¬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.
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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.
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.
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 100β¬ 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.
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Looks preety good, i think i'll have to swim to Europe to get one...
It's only IP55, so good luck on your swim back.
No headphone jack. I really wish they'd bring that back.
What's the deal with phones never having a 16:9 aspect ratio anymore?
I suspect that if you were to cut the screen at the rounded edges, the sensor island and the onscreen nav buttons you'll be left with a 16:9 screen.
In other words its a 16:9 screen with some margin for curves and controls.
8 years support
Wow. I wonder if they have a contract with Qualcomm for that.
No, what they did was pick an SoC called QCM6490 which is used for embedded and industrial applications, and Qualcomm officially supports those for 8 years, unlike the snapdragon SoCs. According to gsmarena it should have performance similar to a snapdragon 778G.
Yeah, just read about it. That said Qualcomm's part of the support is said to be 5 years by Ron at Ars:
Let's talk about that industry-leading 8β10 years of Android support, which doesn't necessarily mean 8β10 major OS updates. For now, Fairphone is promising "at least five operating system upgrades" because that is how long its weird Qualcomm chipset will officially be supported. Fairphone says Qualcomm will support that chip "until 2028" and after that, "Fairphone commits to extend support until 2031 and is aiming for 2033, giving users a total of eight to ten years of software support."
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Would be nice if any of these new parts could be used in the older phones. Is that the case?
After all the Fairphone 4 only came out less than 2 years ago.
Would be better for Fairphone to focus on some kind of upgradeable platform which is better for the environment than keep making new phones. For now I'll stick to buying second hand phones whenever mine breaks.
Tbf, FP4 will still have replacement parts available for years to come. Not as good as having a (potentially indefinite) upgrade path, but FP4 isn't obsolete.
I don't think this will ever happen, it's an anomaly unique to the PC market. The first time Fairphone did this with the FP3, allowing users to upgrade their camera, there was some minor OS workaround added to make this work, because the hardware in phones just isn't set up to handle this.
IIRC I believe the workaround involved trying to get the installed camera to do something that the old one was not capable of doing, and if that operation failed it would spin up the driver for the upgraded camera. PCs use shared memory and a bunch of other standardised stuff I'm unfamiliar with to simply ask a device what it is, but phones can't do that for their internals (for the most part)
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GSMarena reports displayport support in the USB.
Can anyone confirm this? The site doesn't mention it and it's a game changing feature imo.
Smartphones technology progress is slowed down recently, but still, do you think that this phone will be usable in 8 years?
It won't be top of the line, but I don't really see why it wouldn't still be usable at least.
And even if the person buying the phone today won't consider it usable for their needs in eight years time, they can still sell it to someone who doesn't have a need for a high spec'ed phone.
I think you can look at it similarly to how one would look at an 8 year old laptop today.
A decently spec'ed laptop from 2015 is still very usable today, as long as you keep your expectations reasonable.
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If you are used to it, probably. I know that my pixel 4a is slowing down after 3 years. But I am just used to the speed, so it is okay for me.
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No headphone jack? Wtf?! Pass!
Isn't GrapheneOS supported on Fairphone as well?
No graphene OS support, they rely on some secure isolation hardware feature only found on Google Tensor chips, unique to Pixel phones
Fairphone officially has e/OS (Murena??) , but there are a few unofficial alternatives too
Ah alright. Thanks for the clarification
No, only pixel.
Kudos on Fairphone for offering 8 years of software updates.
As an owner of FP4, my biggest gripes with the FP4 are the software updates. Bugs keep languishing for months before they are acknowledged and then months pass before the bugs are fixed. Three annoying issues with my FP4 that I deal with on a daily basis:
- Screen dimming bug. First reported in Feb and the earliest possible fix is in October. My phone is useless when I'm out and about and the level of urgency implied by FP4 for this issue baffles me.
- NFC stops working randomly
- 5 GHz hotspot was broken for months and only fixed recently
I don't care much about Android 13 as long as I get timely security patches. What I want is a bug free experience and that's something FP4 fails to deliver.
An annoying hardware decision is the SIM card can't be hot swapped. Not sure why this wasn't addressed with FP5.
@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)
Just buy a used Fairphone 5 then in a few years? That's what I'm gonna do I think. This one is powerful enough imo
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