Hello there!
My Fairphone 3 is turning 5 years old is a few weeks and I would like to get a new phone.
I really like Fairphone and my first choice is to get the Fairphone 5. As its almost one year old, I would like to have your opinion on the device after using it for almost a year.
I have a few “worries” about this new iteration but maybe you can clear that out for me.
The processor: the main problem with my Fairphone 3 today is that it freezes or slows down quite a lot. There’s sometimes a huge delay when taking photos, apps are slow, etc… A factory reset didn’t fix it and I would like to avoid using an alternative OS for now. So the question is: how do you feel about the performance of your FP5? Do you feel it’ll be okay in 4-5 years?
The photos: I’ve seen the thread on this forum about FP5 photo gallery. It seems that the Fairphone 5 is doing OK on that part. What’s your opinion on this?
Battery: Some reviews say that the battery drains quite a lot or struggles to last an entire day. Do you have any problem with that? Having to buy a second battery is a bit weird in my opinion when ecology is one of the reasons to buy a Fairphone.
I’ve had mine since September '23 and am happy with it.
Your questions:
I’ve read that the processor was chosen for long-term updates. No performance issues at all for me. It’s always difficult to predict so many years in advance in IT, but I’d say it will still be doing the job in 5 years’ time.
Photos are good. I’m no great photographer but I find the wide-angle useful.
I keep the battery charged between 20% - 80% (there’s a setting to limit charging to 80%). I’ve never run out and usually only use about 40% of the capacity in 24h, so could go for two days on a full charge if necessary.
I would advise against a second battery anyway. Consider a powerbank if you really need spare power in your pocket, whatever phone you use.
Currently, I am perfectly satsified with the performance. Any hiccup or lag spike, I kinda wanna blame on software. It plays 3D games, it plays back 4K videos, app switching is snappy. I can not predict to you how long this will be the case. Assuming apps dont get any worse or unoptimised, I think it will always be good enough for most everiday tasks.
After one year, I’d say that all FP5 camera reviews on the internet are spot on. Focus is sharp, taking pictures is quick and snappy. But the colors are just never thaaaat punchy. I’ve had cases where taking an image of a sunsetting scene produced a very flat image. Sometimes pictures turn out like they are all evenly lit. Everything is perfectly bright and visible. But that is a bad thing. Dark spots are brightened too much. Like an unedited RAW image. Except its not raw.
But on a sunny day, in a well lit scene, it just works. No notes.
Back in September, some youtube reviewer tested battery life, with different use cases, and they took note of extra heavy battery drain during video playback. And I can back that up. Media kills battery for some reason. Also sometimes, the phone is slightly warm for no apparent reason. I have no idea what it might be doing in the background. BUT in my experience, navigation, chat apps, web browsing, doomscrolling, are all pretty efficient.
And even when I say videos drain battery, that still means you can have it playing a 1080p youtube video at max brightness and volume for like 6-7 ish hours. I didnt test this exact scenario. But in my experience, that would be about how it would go.
10 months with FP5 and it delivers. Very snappy I would say.
It’s quite difficult to estimate the outcome of five consecutive Android updates, it feels that thermal throttling is more frequent with Android 14.
The battery is fine. Most of the days the limit of 20-80 suffices for the day. Yet with heavy usage (navigation, pictures, roaming) it might be good to carry a powerbank.
I am a bit concerned about the kernel stuff discussed in other thread, but I hope that can be improved, anyway it’s a complex issue with chipset providers’ role critical.
Wide angle doesn’t work perfectly, distorting pictures sometimes at the corners, while the portrait mode blurs the background in a kinda artificial way. The macro mode is fantastic, selfies the best I experienced, the night mode impressive though a bit overlit
I have never had a serious issue with the phone, it has been pretty reliable.
There’s been a practice on this forum I have observed to create a poll on the user satisfaction a year after a release. So soonish I guess:)
Maybe rather the sceen, as we have seen he battery drain with AoD enabled…also using GMaps to navigate and have the screen on all time drains battery quickly while when the screen is off, there not much battery drain with navigation.
Coming from FP3 you will see the difference, no need to use a GCam port anymore to take good pictures.
Thats dependent on how you use it. The more screen on time the faster battery drains. I dont see the need for a second battery, and I rarely needed my power bank.
For ße having used FP2 for around 5 years, a second hand FP3 around a year, the FP4 and FP5 in parralel since a year, the FP5 is def the best FP so far.
From what I understand with this thread, battery isn’t great but if you disable Always-on (removed on A14), lift to wake and touch to wake… Battery life is “back to normal”. Disabling 5G can help as well…
I don’t need those features so I might disable all of that on day one
It may be a hardware problem, too, but they fixed it in software by disabling the ability to use the AoD. People are extremely excited about this ingenious solution…
But we’re ranting about the bad things again. As a previous FP2 user I only waited for the FP5 to be orderable and thus am one of the first who received one. I have never had any severe issues, not even hickups. Just like every technical device nowadays there are a few bugs but none of them is a severe issue for me (I haven’t used the AoD when it was still available but might have done that if it wasn’t so energy hungry). Performance is far sufficient for now, we’ll see how that develops over the years. At the end of my FP2 usage the phone spent most of its screen time (and with this battery time) on waiting for things to happen. Battery time may always be better of course. I try to avoid energy-hungry things. In some rare situations the phone may get warm, but not hot. Photos are great, nothing to complain about.
It has to be a software issue. Because when you boot up the phone, the pixels are off during the boot logo. Then a split second before the boot animation plays with the dancing dots on the blue background, the black starts to glow.
I’ve had AoD and lift to wake disabled ever since I owned the phone. And since I dont get 5G due to my subscription package, I’ve had that disabled too since the begining. So everything I’m saying, is supposedly already a best case scenario, where I’ve done everything the comunity recommends to minimise unwanted drain.
Ordered mine at launch and I’m generally pretty happy with it. My biggest gripe, was solved with the android 14 update (if you opened the camera app and pressed the shutter button for the first picture, it’d just not do anything for 5 seconds and then you’d get a picture from somewhere in between that time).
I don’t really do much with my phone, so just looking up relevant things and texting is most of what I do. For that it is perfectly fine. However, watching videos makes it get very warm and drains the battery pretty quickly. Not sure what’s going on there.
Some other smaller issues:
The default launcher forces you to have the google search bar on top of your home screen. You can disable the google app, which makes it only show the the date there, but the space is still taken up.
Switching to another launcher brakes the multitasking pane. Haven’t checked since the android 14 update, but the thread on here is still going, so I suspect the issue isn’t fully resolved.
When calling someone, they pretty often can’t here me for the first couple of seconds.
Idle battery life is alright (when you aren’t doing anything). I also try to keep the battery between 80-20% and only fully charge it, when I absolutely need to. Not sure if this actually the case, but the battery drains way slower from 100-80%.
Battery life when listening to local music from spotify is kinda meh.
So I’d only really recommend this phone to someone who needs it for the basics, with some exceptions. If you are more of a phone power user, I wouldn’t recommend it. Comparing it to other phones, it feels like you get a ~500€ phone from 2023, with somewhat janky software.
It is also pretty thick and heavy, even more so if you put a case on it.
I’d personally wait for a Fairphone 6, if you can survive that long and just hope they get things better. Otherwise, it feels like a perfectly adequate phone.
The 5 seconds delay when taking a photo is what’s triggering me with my FP3. Glad it got resolved with Android 14 on FP5 but that’s not reassuring for the future…
I’m a mixed type of user. I don’t do any heavy task (no gaming for instance) but I’m an Android developer so I use my phone pretty often at work to test things and I have a Garmin smartwatch so I kinda fear that bluetooth will drain my battery too quickly.
My wife will supposedly also switch from FP3 to FP5 so I think we’ll buy only one FP5 for now and see if the device is okay for both of us before ordering the second one.
Well, the main camera is pretty decent now, I’d say. The ultra wide camera is unusable though.
I know that the SoC has some problems going into deep sleep mode, when the display is off. So you’d have to test whether your smartwatch keeps it in or out of it. But yeah, I’m hoping to get the full 8 Years out of my FP5, but if the software support keeps being this janky, I might reconsider at some point :c
Even the pictures you share have the issue with the image just dissolving at the edges. Since I don’t really want that in my pictures, I’m just not using it. If you don’t have a problem with that, I guess the camera is useful to some people.
