Fairphone 6 hardware firmware improvements?

Discuss The Products
1

I’ve been on the fence of buying a FP6. However the reviews are giving me some pause. The hardware itself are perfectly usable, though the sound processing of the mic and the cameras’ computational photography limitation do leave FP6 behind in terms of performance. Much of the issues I have with the FP6 right now are software related.

For those who had FP5, did the phone’s performance improve over the years or is it as good as it gets out of the box?

2

To put in my two cents worth, FP4 and FP5 have both definitely improved a lot from the launch, most of the software issues have been solved and e.g. for FP4 the performance of the camera got significantly improved. For FP5, one of the most hated decisions was to disable the AOD, but the problem there was that the screen hardware didn’t support it. It seemed to be that it couldn’t reliably deliver very dim brightness, and the phone would then have battery and screen burn-in problems.

For FP6, they’ve already solved some issues, but some fixes are definitely still under way. I believe they can fix them, but wouldn’t guess or promise any time frames for that. Some software problems can be surprisingly difficult to replicate, find a solution to and solve. If you think you can’t live with the current state of the software, I’d suggest to wait for them to fix the problems first. Currently what you’re buying is a product with some software issues and a promise they’ll try to fix them when they can.

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3

I use all the last three gens (FP4, FP5 and now FP6). I think the software for the FP5 improved a lot with updates, but it was a very slow process. The big camera update came months after the update and was a noticeable improvement. I heard that the same camera improvements were ported to FP4, but I already sold mine at that point. Despite this, there are still annoying bugs lying around (for example, the delayed call notification got solved only after the upgrade to Android 15). It’s a decent phone, but far from perfect.

FP6 is disappointing in many regards as well. Most of them are hardware-related:

  • Cameras are not as wide as FP5. I toggle the wide view and get almost no improvement.
  • The volume buttons are now on the other side, and I take a screenshot whenever I want to lock it.
  • USB-2.0 port instead of USB-3 on the FP5 (copying photos and videos is noticeably slower)
  • The vibration motor is even weaker than the FP5 (when they switched to a special one that uses fewer rare-earth materials). I miss a lot of calls due to it (my phone is always on vibrate only)

On the stuff that might be fixed with software:

  • The toggle button is useless for me and doesn’t have a “do nothing” feature setting (I hope to get a software update for that)
  • The toggle to limit the battery charging to 80% doesn’t fully work. I hope it’s software and can be fixed, but 20% of the time, the charging goes beyond 80%.
  • The camera app crashes and doesn’t save the last photo (I had this with FP5 as well - this is frustrating)
  • When you use the camera, it sometimes kills the music app you run in the background (I had this with the FP5 as well - annoying)

I stuck with the FP6 because I like the form factor more than my FP5 (which is used by my son now), but in many ways, it is a hardware downgrade from the FP5. I would switch to a smaller FP5 without missing anything from the FP6’s new features/upgrades.

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4

You know that there’s a workaround for configuring it to do nothing, don’t you?

5 Likes
5

I didn’t know. Thanks for the link.

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6

I like mine as the flashlight switch so I don’t need to fiddle with menus.