Hi guys,
I purchased my Fairphone 5 in late February, so it has only been 2 months of me using it, but I think that I have already formed a firm opinion on it that I would like to share.
Firstly, let me say that I am generally quite satisfied (not wowed, mind you, but at this price point I was not really expecting to be) with the phone. It is mostly solid, reliable, and quick enough for my purposes. The ability to replace parts without major equipment is a major point of satisfaction, as I will explain later. So, while the rest of this post will read like a litany of issues, please keep in mind that I am only doing that to highlight them.
There are several minor, but quite annoying issues:
- The tap to wake feature does not work. Literally, tapping the screen of the phone with my fingertip when it is flat on the table does not wake it up. Another user in an earlier thread suggested that using the flat of your finger instead of the tip works better, and indeed, doing ‘shave and a haircut’ with the flat of three fingers does, usually, get a reaction about a second later. Usually.
Edit: I should also add that the hardware responsible for this functionality works fine, i.e. when the phone falls asleep, tapping to wake it up produces an immediate response. This leads me to think that the issue is with the way the tap to wake feature was created and programmed.
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The facial recognition feature is useless (at least to me). It works just fine, i.e. it unlocks the phone. The problem is, it just unlocks the phone. But most of the time I don’t want to unlock the phone. I just want to see the notifications on the lock screen. Compare this to, say, the iPhone, where facial recognition unlocks the phone but keeps you on the lock screen until you swipe up. I ended up disabling the feature.
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The screen dimmer feature is not functioning correctly. Based on previous experiences I expect that in a dark room the screen will dim. Not so here. When on my phone in a dark room (say, before going to sleep), the screen continually brightens and darkens. I have found no remedy to this other than to disable adaptive brightness when I go to bed and re-enable it again in the morning. Is it a huge issue? No. But it is annoying.
Finally, here is the big problem for me - the battery. Since I first received the phone I noticed that it was discharging much quicker than I would have expected for a new phone. After what I consider to be a day of moderate usage, I routinely end the day with 10-20% battery remaining. Before anyone starts thinking that I am some sort of power user, I did not experience this with my earlier devices which were an iPhone 6 and Pixels 5 and 6 (btw, the discerning user will also note from this list that I am not a very demanding user) with which I was going to bed with the battery around 50%, at least when they were functioning normally. With heavy usage, like during a business trip when the phone IS your office, it requires to be plugged in at least a few times a day.
This morning, I woke up to the phone, which had been plugged in all night, at 69% and not charging further. I tried several different cords, plugs, outlets, my laptop charger…all to no avail. It will not charge past 69% and the status screen shows a charge time of 3 days. Fortunately, after having been let down by a flat battery on a recent trip, I had just purchased a replacement battery (and here I am very happy with the Fairphone’s ease of part replacement, which would not have been an option with another device) and have it to use. I opened a support case this morning (if anyone on the Fairphone team is reading this, the case number is 1267020) and am looking forward to hearing the response.
Unfortunately, this may well be a game-ender for me and the Fairphone in the medium to long term. While I am, again, generally satisfied with the phone’s performance, I also need it to be usable for my lifestyle and pace of work. As the original battery seems to have failed completely, I think that there is a chance that the rapid discharge I was experiencing this whole time was a result of a faulty cell rather than it working as designed. I am sitting in the airport as I type this, waiting for the boarding call for my next trip, and hoping that with the new battery I will see my battery last significantly longer. However, if it is, as I suspect, not the case, I will need to switch to another device sometime in the near future.
