Closed Poll: What improvements on Fairphone 2's Hardware are most important to you?

Edit: This poll will close on Monday, 23rd!

Now, we all know that the Fairphone is not about the most shiny hardware, but social responsibility. And i am glad Fairphone is Working on Improvements in all aspects, be it repairability, lifecycle, production and sourcing of conflict-free minerals.

But all of that aside, for a moment let you inner child or geek out and tell me: What part of the FP2 Hardware has to be really improved compared to the FP1?

I have compiled a huge list with a lot of contributions in this thread: Wishlist for the FP2 which is still popular with over 2000views and 135 comments. But for this Poll, i reduced that to a managable list. Now it is your task: Decide for one option below!

Note: I have left out higher screen resolution, better CPU as well as LTE because they are already confirmed. I left out “repairability” because Fairphone told us this is one of the main reason for them to design the phone themselves. I left out Bluetooth 4 LE because i see that as a given.

#Vote here! :slight_smile:

  • Usability “Paper Cuts” like the proximity sensor which currently leads to hanging up calls, the wrongly labeled soft touch buttons or the power button which seems to easy to press leading to people turning of their phones in their pocket or the range of the screen brightness (to dark in sunlight, to bright at night).
  • Battery lifetime. An easy one. But would you sacrifice lightweight or processing power?
  • Improved location services - Better GPS, GLONASS introduction. Get a location fix faster and more exact.
  • Make the Screen larger!
  • Reduce weight - The currently Fairphone is rather heavy, some like that, other not so much. How important is weight for you?

0 voters

[Edit by @Stefan: See @ben’s nice summary + chart here. :slight_smile: ]

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Nice poll. But I choose neither. I don’t have problems with Proximity Sensor nor GPS (at least not after trying some solutions on the Forum), I never got below 20% with my battery, I don’t really care if the screen gets larger or smaller and as long as the Phone won’t make a hole in my pocket because it’s so heavy I don’t really care much about weight either.

Well maybe thats why I won’t get the new Fairphone, because I’m still so happy with the Fairphone 1 :smiley:

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@paulakreuzer The task was to decide for one not none! :wink:

I couldn’t decide between battery lifetime and weight, but in the end I chose battery lifetime, but mostly because I think my battery is faulty. I cannot get through one day with my usage pattern…

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Dang, well maybe I should have my permission to (not) vote in polls revoked. :wink:
Btw, I also didn’t vote in your screen size poll, because I missed the option “wichever is best compatible with a phone that’s as fair as possible”.

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OK from now on we shall always have an option which says “Other… (Please specify!)”. :slight_smile:

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But what if want everybody to decide ? :slight_smile:

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The proximity sensor could use work indeed.
The orientation sensor seems to drift on my one

This is over 25 or so seconds, lying flat and motionless on the table…
The effect is especially visible in “Google Cardboard demo”.

Ok since you asked so nicely! :wink:
If I really think about it I do find problems with the proximity sensor: I use F2L to switch off the screen with the proximity sensor and sometimes when the screen is not totally clean and I’m out in the sun the proximity sensor seems to get activated by the smears on my screen and that locks the screen.
Also if I didn’t have to use Gravity Box to set the brightness to levels much lower than the default bottom, I could use the auto brightness function, wich - if it worked well - would come in handy when leaving a dark room and stepping into the sun.

So I chose option 1.

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I voted for “battery life” because my usage pattern typically ends up with a 40-42 hours duration without charge, but I always switch off radios (with exception of phone) to enhance battery life.
@paulakreuzer: I use also F2L and I suffer the same problems in sunny days, so when I’m outside with a very strong sun light I disable it.
To avoid too many power button presses I also use Gesture Navigation, an Xposed module which lets you configure screen gestures also to lock the screen :wink:
I also remember there is a way to reduce the screen backlight levels by entering engineering mode, but I don’t remember where I read about it, sorry!

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Screen’s big enough for me and I don’t mind the weight either. I prefer a slightly heavier, more robust feeling phone than the ultra lightweight plastic feel of Samsung devices.

Bluetooth is important as well as a better camera (not necessarily higher pixel density but better image quality). 4G/LTE is probably also a good addition. I also think it’s a very good thing if the next FairPhone keeps its SD card slot.

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So, what’s your vote? :slight_smile:

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Oh lol, I didn’t realize it was a poll.
I voted for better GPS support because that is still a nagging issue with the phone. It has much improved since the 1.8 update but it’s still a little jumpy from time to time.

Second choice woudl be having the hardware OS buttons (options, home, back) replaced with software on-screen buttons. It saves some size of the device without making the screen smaller.

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The first point looks like a bug, no?

Definitely the GPS - I have to ignore about half the directions when using the navigation feature, as the location has suddenly jumped 3 roads over from where I really am (my previous Android smart phone never had any such problems).

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I recognise the problem. Driving on a highway and getting a warning because you should only drive 50 km/h, turn left and drive to the nearest highway :smiley:

I think GPS problems could need further and deeper investigations wrt the precision, because I never had problems like this using either OSMAnd and Navit (I don’t have GApps installed, so I can’t speak about Maps).
I suppose there could be at least 2 kind of problems:

  1. GPS poor reception (due to lack of signal power and/or satellites visibility, or for hardware problems with the internal receiver);
  2. errors on vector map data (due to low precision in some areas or wrong data);
    Maybe we could try to open a new thread and do some sort of research using a set of “standard” tools (like SatStat for testing the GPS reception and OSMAnd or any OpenStreetMap based software to test map data).
    What do you think? :smile:
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Concerning GPS precision for me the only problem is because of charging : see below

I hope that it could be solved by software (v1.8 ??) and for sure FP2 GPS precision MUST NOT be influenced by charging.

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Is it not an issue of the charger? It seems that it can be resolved by using an iron ring.

Uhm! That’s very interesting, I’ll give it a try, didn’t think about this before, so I am unable to say if this happened to me while driving.
Thank you!

I tried with a very stable power supply : battery of my car (motor is stopped) with a linear voltage regulator (lm317) to convert 12V from the battery to 5V needed by USB port (No noise-generating switch mode power supply like the ones you can find in cheap cigarette lighter adapter)

And even in this case I get the same faulty behaviour : GPS is wrong and is OK as soon as I unplug the USB cable.