Coming from Android One:
- Double tap to turn the screen on
- Slide on the fingerprint sensor in order to show or hide the notification area.
Coming from Android One:
I have mine since last Friday and I love this phone! I have no real issues at all. Two things are a little bit annoying:
What I really like the most about the Fairphone is the back cover. With all those fancy phones, I have the problem, that they tend to slip out of my hand because of of their glass and aluminum back covers so I had to put them in silicon or rubber cases. The Fairphone back has a lot of grip also with my very dry hands. It also has a nearly perfect balance point. If it sits in my hand it sits.
I found the Google searchbar pretty useless, as well, and I’m quite happy with the Lawnchair launcher now, available for free at the Play Store.
I recieved my FP3 just yesterday.
These are the initial thoughts i’ve had on it so far (swapping from an LG G5)
-The phone feels very solid depite the mostly plastic frame, that suprised me!
-Software-wise, all good bar the horrible default launcher with the unremovable search bar. After i swapped to the Nova launcher all is fine however.
For the hardware itself:
-MUCH better signal reception than my old phone (approx 3-4 ‘bars’ of signal, old phone had 0 to 1 bar in the exact same location)
-zero issues with wifi, infact again better signal strength than my old phone.
-The screen is very bright, only issue is it’s perhaps too bright at night.
-The sound seems an improvement too, i struggled to hear people on max volume on my old phone, this is now plenty loud enough at 3/4 volume
-Only real niggle is the fingerprint sensor, as i’m so used to it being a power button as well as the sensor, so i keep hammering the sensor to attempt to turn the screen off . Also has a habit of attempting to register fingerprints far too quickly (eg. if i pick the phone up and say halfway down my finger hits the sensor, it’ll attempt to read the sensor 4+ times in a second or two them time out the fingerprint unlock because of too many fails…)
All in all i am extremely happy with the phone so far
If you press the middle menu button twice, it will put the screen off. It is an alternative to the power button press once. It is useful because in many situations it requires less travel. It is useless to put the screen on though (for obvious reasons).
I find the fingerprint sensor regarding true positives very good (have no opinion about false positives, true negatives, and false negatives as of yet). Partial fingerprint is indeed partial, and it does happen sometimes, but I immediately realize it. Because of the feeling (feedback from circle), you’ll train yourself to aim better.
Been using my FP3 for a month now, have just sold my old phone so I guess I’m committed to it I can echo the previous comments about the large size of the phone, but to be expected with the modularity. No problems with performance and all my apps loaded just fine. Battery life has been good - usually down to 20 or 30% by the end of the day, and I regularly go a whole weekend on a single charge. I use Nova launcher, so never had the “white search bar” issue. Screen brightness is fine for me, however I do find that the lowest volume level for ringtones & notifications is too loud for the office environment. No problems with calls, wifi or mobile data (I’m on EE in the UK).
The only negative things I can say are that the screen is not as sensitive as I’m used to (sometimes have to press twice, or harder, especially near the edge of the screen), I once had the problem where the headphone socket squealed when inserting my headphones and then did not work (fixed by restarting the phone) and a couple of times the Bluetooth connection to my car hasn’t worked properly, usually at the end of the day (fixed by restarting the phone). Oh, and there’s no NFC toggle in the pulldown menu (I had to use a 3rd party widget for this).
You get used to it I came from an LG V20.
Ah, i think i didn’t explain well enough
Say i’m taking the phone out of my pocket holding it like this, this will trigger fingerprint tries several times per second and near instantly lock out the fingerprint unlock:
Was never an issue on the G5 but happening often here.
Only a minor thing, but still mildly annoying
The actual recognition when trying to unlock the phone is damn impressive though, far better than on my old phone
Fixes could possibly be having the sensor very slightly recessed as in the G5, or having a longer timeout between fingerprint sensor retries.
EDIT: after a little testing, the LG has a slightly recessed sensor, but more importantly, if you hold the phone in such a way as to trigger the fingerprint sensor with a part of your finger that is not your finger-tip it triggers once, and does not retry until you move your finger away from the sensor, the FP3 just retries until it locks out, this is a software issue that is fixable i think
Thanks now I do understand where you’re coming from. I’ll need remind myself to do some related experiments during travels the coming days, see if I can reproduce.
No problems here, everything works as expected (or even better!).
If you press the middle menu button twice, it will put the screen off. It is an alternative to the power button press once. It is useful because in many situations it requires less travel. It is useless to put the screen on though (for obvious reasons).
This doesn’t work for me at all, unfortunately. I use the Lawnchair launcher, but even with it turned off, pressing the middle menu button twice does nothing on my Fairphone 3, and I couldn’t find anything about this feature on the internet.
Have you installed any extra app that allows this, or do you have any idea why it doesn’t work for me? I’d really like to use this feature…
You could try to use some audio volume editing software to change your ringtone mp3 file or what ever file you have to some reasonable volume. I see it unlikely we’ll get some software update for this.
Was down the pub with my friends earlier, the FP3 got A LOT of attention due to the semi-clear rear plastic.
Nobody had heard of the phone at all. It’s now such a rare feature it really stands out
I have a new FP3 for 3 days now. Hardware wise so far everything is awesone, no flaws.
I do have some issues with the preinstalled Stock Android 9 apps though. Google is to blame, but I’m really looking forward to an Open OS for this one to come out.
Edit: After having FP3 for some more now, I also ran into some issues. The only noteworthy one is the microphone auto-gain, which goes crazy when there is background-noises such as music. As such audio-recordings with FP3 of music or voice with music in background are almost unusable. This also affects calls when there is background noise.
I think this is a driver issue, so probably affects all FP3s but might/should be fixable with a software upgrade. see Very low quality audio recordings for details.
If your FP3 does NOT have that issue, please post that in the linked thread.
Sorry, I was wrong. This works perfectly well with FP2 on LineageOS 16 (based on Android 9 Pi) with microG (which should not matter). It works with Trebuchet and Lawnchair, so I guess it is not launcher related as it does not work on FP3 on Android 9 Pi (official firmware) with Lawnchair (nor the default launcher, QuickStep or whatever it was called).
After almost 4 weeks with my FP3. Battery life is very decent, camera is ok, good screen, speed of the phone is just fine, call quality is good: it works too well, it’s almost boring. Nothing I have to fix, nothing I have to worry about - as a nerd I am almost disappointed.
Worst of all, I can’t take it apart like the Fairphone 2 because it’s screwed together. Fairphone, you have stolen my party gag!
P.S.: please, fix that thing with the notification LED!
I have been using the phone for 2 weeks now and I would like to share my opinion compared to previously used Blackberry KeyOne Black edition:
Now some things that I do not like (mostly software issues):
Overall I love this phone. Issues that I have can be solved by software update or can be found similar on any phone in any price range, nothing is perfect. The thing I hate most now is absolute absence of any glass protector for my display and camera module because the phone is too large for me when trying to carry it with the protector bumper.
I’ve had FP1, FP2 and now FP3. Each is much better than the previous one. FP3 is stable, good battery life, works fine. I do also have the problem that I inadvertently touch the fingerprint reader when I just want to look at it and it gets confused. Maybe I’ll learn to keep my fingers under control
Been using it for a week now, and basically everything works better than before. The issues I have are mostly stock-android-related (no quick home/away profiles, anymore, no LED notification), I will survive. The camera is a little slow when used with OpenCamera, even in good light conditions it takes half a second to shoot, but I did not explore this any further…
All in all: a big thumbs up! If only we had a LineageOS port already…
I finally made my FP3 fully working without gapps! So i’m basically using it for a day now. It’s such an improvement to my FP1 - Camera seems to be pretty dope, battery life & GPS, too. Just an open OS is missing