I have had a Fairphone 3+ for about 3 3/4 years. I really appreciate that I have what looks like a new phone, given that I’ve smashed the screen once. (This took a pretty determined effort on my part to do - I managed to drop it into a closing car door). Also, I replaced the USB module as the socket had worn, as they often have a tendency to do on all phones, but it usually means replacing the whole phone.
But I’m getting increasingly frustrated by its performance. Switching Bluetooth on can hang the phone for around 30 seconds. A lot of Apps are giving a message saying they are unresponsive.
Sometimes it just seems to want to go off and think about things for about 10-15 seconds.
My wife isn’t getting these issues on hers, so it’s probably apps like Teams that the phone can’t handle.
I’ve done a Reset once. It did help for a while, but it was a lot of hassle, and eventually the issues returned.
So, thinking of moving to a Fairphone 5. Do you think it may help with these issues?
I only recently saw a friend scrolling the map in Osmand on his FP3. That looked more like a slideshow (memories to my FP2 times…) than like the smooth transition that my FP5 does in the same situation. So yes, if it’s purely about power then the FP5 is better than the FP3. On the other hand with using badly programmed apps you can bring every phone to its knees. And also on my FP2 I’ve experienced Teams as extremely resource-hungry, so that could be a candidate. I haven’t used Teams on my FP5 yet, but I’m pretty sure that it could keep up with this hunger far better.
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While I agree you can see performance differences pretty well when you can compare the same OsmAnd setup on different phones, and I would expect the Fairphone 5 to do better … on my Fairphone 3 it’s not at all “more like a slideshow”. But of course that’s anecdotal, too.
Anyway …
Yes.
As you experienced after the reset and in comparison with your wife’s phone, you most probably get the phone to lag with your App setup and usage, which sometimes just can’t be helped depending on the Apps.
With the Fairphone 5 you can simply throw more raw power and resources at this, which should help.
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I was happy with my FP4, that I could use any app i wanted without performance problems
(I did not played games on my FP4)
When my phone was killed by a ligthening shock from the car charger -.-, I bough a FP5, which has a better camera.
In total: again I am happy with my FP5, still having no performance issues, only 1 bug:
I am using e/ Murena not original google android and all apps I want and use are working fine, exclude this selfi camera bug.
MFG
Steffen
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I don’t think I would recommend the FP4 for games. I find that the battery drain is pretty crazy, the GPS bug more or less ruins games like Pokémon Go and it gets really warm.
I’d imagine the FP5 being much much better in this regard.
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To navigate: I use Maps powered by magic lane (magic earth). I am very happy with this app, you can download the maps and navigate totally offline. Worked great on every holidays we have been.
After activating Location it need ~1 seconds to find your correct position …
I also experienced painfully slow FP3 behavior when activating the bluetooth. It would hang for dozens of seconds. I tried to find what was the root cause but in vain. It was not Teams though since it was not installed. I suspected it might be related to the fact that I had configured many apps to rely on the SD card as primary storage. But never took the time to rollback the configs to emmc to confirm that hypothesis.
The multiples “interface is not responding” messages happening randomly and sometimes at very inappropriate times killed eventually killed my motivation to keep the FP3.
I moved to the FP5 on March/April and have been very happy performance-wise. There are a few annoying bugs though like the noise cancelling function removing kids voice during hands-free calls and GPS being a bit unstable in some conditions (but still very usable). Hopefully Fairphone will find a solution…
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I moved from FP3 to FP5 for the same reasons about a year ago and am still happy with the decision. Teams also runs on it very smoothly.
My FP5 is, of course, the 8 GB RAM model. I don’t know if the smaller RAM on the new cheaper 6GB alternative makes a huge difference.
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Thanks all for your help. I did get a new Fairphone 5. At the moment, it is a lot faster and better altogether. Some apps improved a lot by the improved biometrics as well. It feels sturdier, too.
Its performance might degrade, but at the moment, I’m very happy with the upgrade.
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Found something for anybody experiencing this … OsmAnd - menu - Settings - OsmAnd settings - Map rendering engine.
Make sure to choose Version 1 here on older phones, as Version 2 (OpenGL) might indeed look more like a slideshow, e.g. on a Fairphone 3 (I’ve seen this now myself).
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True, and recently I found out that the backup from my FP2 led to my FP5 not being able to show the 3D map that I had seen on my wife’s phone because the backup had the version set to 1 on my phone.
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