Hi everyone,
So we picked up his and hers Fairphone 5s a few months ago and love them but we’ve had a couple of issues.
First off, I flashed the phones with the /e/OS “community version”, which is supposedly the most stable version available if you didn’t purchase your phone through Murena. I have heard that you can still use the “stable” version even without a Murena phone but would like to have confirmation on that. I played it safe and installed the community version.
Since we’re in the US, T-Mobile was the best choice and we are on their network (through Mint, actually).
We’ve since gone through a couple of updates, currently on /e/OS v2.5 but the odd audio issue remains, along with the occasional bluetooth pairing issue which is probably unrelated.
The main problem we’re seeing is that sometimes, when answering a call, the microphone appears to be inactive, like it’s muted. Switch the phone to speaker and back again (or if using Speakerphone - switch it off and back on again) seems to resolve the issue, so it seems likely that the software isn’t initializing the hardware correctly. This happens on both of our phones. We’ve also had the audio go out during a call, it seems to coincide with switching away from the phone app, going back to it seems to resolve the problem. We’re not switching to another app that grabs the microphone so I’m not sure why this is happening.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? Also, when I initially unlocked the bootloader and flashed the phone, it updated some things like the radio firmware, camera (I think), and a bunch of other hardware on the phone. During subsequent updates from the /e/OS updater app under settings, do these continue to get updated as improvements are made or would I need to unlock the bootloader and go through that process again to get the more recent firmware updates?
The only other thing that occurs to me is that we’re using the FUTO keyboard and text-to-speech AI model, so I wonder if that could possibly be grabbing the microphone from time to time. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for reading!
- Phil