I don’t know how much experience you or your team have with customer support elsewhere, but have you noticed any differences between Fairphone customers and other customers in your interactions with them?
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Next to that, we release an update every month (!) to ensure the phone keeps running smoothly and protected from any outside harm.
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There I want to chime in. As 16.07 will be missed, I fear that you might consider FP open OS as some kind of seconds class citizen. Hope that’s only because things aren’t all up to full speed in the beginning?
Klaus
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So what about Android 6 or even N? They’re supposed to extend the battery life which for me currently is the FP2’s biggest weakness.
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Hi,
You said that you have plans to update the camera module. Is this the case with the battery too? Does this mean you are not developing a Fairphone 3?
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MICHIEL, PLEASE ONLY ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS IF YOU ARE NOT BUSY. THEY AREN’T THAT IMPORTANT.
So I had written a couple other questions down and have to leave now so I’ll just leave them here.
Hi Michiel!
I was wondering why
you decided to add dual-sim functionality to the Fairphone 2. Based
on the use cases you have listed here
I would guess that most people would not find it that useful. I
personally wouldn’t. There are many phones made in Korea, China and
Taiwan that have this functionality, but european phones mostly
don’t. Why did you decide to do this?
Hi Michiel!
Why did you decide
to use a FullHD display on your Fairphone 2? Did you feel that an HD
resolution would not have been sufficient, or that customers would
not have been willing to pay for it? I’m asking this because I have a
720p display on my 4.7inch smartphone, and I can’t really see the
individual pixels as is. Thus I feel like a fullHD screen on a screen
as small as this would be wasteful.
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Hey! I’ve worked in the Fairphone support team since november '13 and don’t have much experience with other support teams, but what I can tell is that our community is actually really amazing. I think Fairphone community members have a bit more patience (which is nice in our current back log situation), but they also think with you, are willing to help out, help out other community members in need, they even organise evenings in cities across Europe to help out other community members.
It really feels like you are serving a community which makes my job so much better! Same is true here at our office, we are not a separate team which sits on another floor or building, but we are an integral part of the company which definitely improves the quality of our support.
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We take the development of Fairphone Open OS very serious. We had a delay last month because of technical issues. The missing commits from 1.5.1 now need to be included, and made into a new release. At this point we think it is better to include the patches from 1.6.x as well, and release at the same time with it, as 16.08.
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We are going to upgrade as soon as we can, without a doubt. Work in progress! But we can’t tell yet to which version that will be yet, we hope to be able to tell you more on this in the coming months. In the meantime, I can only advise you to check out this blog on boosting your battery performance…
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Hi Guys,
thank you for doing the great work at Fairphone!
I would invest in no other phone:)
Anyway, I really like FP2… apart from the screen making trouble once in a while, especially using chrome or FB. E.g. when I want to scroll down, it stops multiple times or jumps all the way to the end of the site, without me giving any input for this specific action… Now, it is not always as bad and comes and goes, but it disturbs the flow of using the phone and can get quite annoying:/
I just wonder if this is something I would need to sent the phone in for or should contact the support at all?
Or could it be fixed with an update?
I am currently in Israel and will be for another month (the post service is quite expensive and unreliable, I wouldn’t want to send my phone from here). The phone is a little over 2 months old and had this issue from the beginning…
Thank you for answering,
Lara
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The battery performance of Fairphone 2 is definitely something we do get a lot of questions about. The big screen of FP2, combined with the growing demand for battery power from customers (more video, heavier apps) makes that many people would like to battery life increased.
Of course we want to cater the needs that are living in our community, at the moment we are investigating how to make this happen. We feel we have ‘just’ finished launching FP2 - and we will now start investigating how we can improve battery life. A possibility would be to release a back cover with an integrated extra battery, but we are still in the very earlier phases of exploring such an option.
The same goes for the camera module; we are investigating an update for this module.
We might develop a Fairphone 3 one day, but we hope we can push that back as far as possible.
So it will at least take some time before we can offer such a thing - you can bet that we will let you know if we make progress on this topic!
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Simple! Many of our customers used to own two phones; one for work, and one for private use. With dual SIM customers only need one phone; a Fairphone. A very quick and dirty way to reduce electronic waste, plus a very convenient solution for someone who doesn’t want to carry around two phones all the time.
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Hello Michiel, thanks for doing this.
You once wrote a while ago that you have access to “repair statistics”. Could you elaborate bit more on what information you track/group/tag/sort and how you work with this data internally or with the ODM to improve customer satisfaction?
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Although you answered before about in-warranty repair procedures you may not have answered emmy’s question due to sent-in repair causes. Therefor I’d like to repeat her question . If I missed the right answer , never mind. If you missed it please try to answer again.
thanks
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I love, love, love the dual sim <3
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Hey Lara!
Glad to hear you like what we do. But, sorry to hear your display is acting up!
First of all, did you already update to our latest software version, 1.5.1? Also, did you try taking the display assembly on and off your phone? We see quite often that this actually solves the problem!
If you updated and taken the screen on and off and this didn’t bring any result, you should indeed get in touch with our support team, since it is then likely we are dealing with a hardware fault. We would then need to replace the display of your phone, but indeed better to go about this not from Israel…
Have a good time over there, greets from rainy Amsterdam!
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Hi,
i have a question regarding FP Open OS an TWRP. Is a support-article planned on how to backup using TWRP? will the existing back-up instructions be updated?
Regards from Germany
Friederike
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Thank you for the quick answer:)
I did the latest update, but didn’t dare to take the screen off yet. I will try!
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Hi! Thanks for having me 
We indeed look at our repair statistics! Fairphone 1 is a completely different phone than Fairphone 2 (off the shelf design, not modulair, etc.) but of course there is still a lot to learn. Since having a repair center in the Netherlands is expensive (Dutch labour costs…) you want to make to make sure that when a phone is sent to our repair center, it really needs to go there.
When we just started out, end '13/early '14, we were a lot less skilled and experienced in this process. That is why with a group of people we decided we wanted to keep repair statistics in order to minimise costs as much as possible. Information we track is obviously what is broken (display, motherboard, battery), if the repair is in- or out of warranty, the full resolution time (how long does it take to get the phone from customer and back?). With this data we hope to have improved customer satisfaction.
We are in constant communication with our factory in China, of course they are very interested to know what goes wrong with the product. Earlier this year we have made a big improvement on our production line with such information, making sure production processes were performed in a way less prone to factory faults.
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Currently we are focusing our support on the hardware and the stock Fairphone Android as this is being used by 98% of our users.
In the next website we will start making room for more community generated content and we already started encouraging community members to help writing these kind of articles so we can include them in our official support.
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Hey, not sure if I really understand you! Are you referring to sent-in repairs that are out of warranty? In 90% of the cases we are dealing with either waterdamage or with broken displays. If the damage is in-warranty, so a factory fault, we try to avoid sending in by replacing the corresponding modules. However, sometimes we still have to research in-warranty cases at our repair center. We usually do this when we can’t figure out from a distance what the problem is. Sometimes you need to thoroughly test a phone to find out! For example, the communication between modules can be the problem, which can be harder to locate through calling or email.
If I didn’t answer your question, let me know!
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