No sound 50+% of the time in calls, until reboot

Hello @Bas_tien,

there is a poll-function in this forum. You could try and use it to get a rough display on who has your problem.

I do not know, how to use it, but it is displayed here

Many greetings
-Hendrik

I’m having the same problem for months already. I contacted the support but they couldn’t help me yet. It’s so frustrating, I cannot use the phone anymore!
Is there any chance to get my money back?

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The problem is that even if 10% of the recent complaints that are unsolved on this forum that’s likely to be less than 0.1% of people who bought phones and never had to query the forum.

So what use would a pole serve, only to highlight the disgruntled users who ideally would speak to FP about ongoing issues not add more work for us poor peer to peer, trying to be helpful nerds.

@dornhe
Thanks for the idea. I think I pass for now.
The reason is that I have spent a huge amount of time in that forum the last 5 days. Mainly answering the same 4 to 5 people, including 1 moderator (@BertG ), which constantly accused me of going on a crusade, bullying Fairphone, being angry, got the title of my post edited without warning until it got reverted by a moderator, threatening me to delete my posts on private message, etc…
This is such a disappointment I got to say. Fortunately, several other people including yourself and @Alex.A , have been intervening and contributing constructively.

I am now in the process of sending back the phone for the support to swap it. I will post results here. At some point, I would like to sum up all that happened here, and try to centralize all the topics related to the sound/call problem, as well as the inability of the support to reasonably deal with it. And also what can be done when support is not a option anymore (use of consumer law, online conplains). But for that, I have to allow time for the phone swapping to happen. Then, doing a poll could be a thing to do.

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If you write a message to discobot, it has really helpful and well-made interactive tutorials about using the forum, including how to make polls :wink: (just tell it to “start tutorial” and after that “start advanced tutorial”).

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@paulamrk
The support is obliged to help you, and swap the phone for another if they can’t fix it remotely. They should also offer you a refund, but you’ll get full or partial, depending on WHEN you started complaining about the problem (they look at the delay between phone reception and start of problem).

I am now in the process of preparing my first return, which took me many emails asking the support for it. I have started another post on the matter of what to do if the support doesn’t help :

It is a bit messy due to some people disagreeing on wording, and I plan to make another clear one, once I have my phone swapped by the support.

As far as I understand, you have already opened a ticket on Fairphone support. Now you got to ask them over and over to get refund or get your phone swapped. It worked for me and for another guy on that thread.
At any moment, if you consider that the support isn’t respecting the consumer law, you can decide other actions, as explained in the link above.

I asked them for a refund and they said that this is not possible as I did not ask for it within the first 14 days of buying the phone. I got it back, repaired, which (they say) only took an software update. I can’t check this and don’t even wanna check it anymore. I contacted customer support again, quoting their warranty, and now I am waiting for a reply. I don’t think, however, that I see any money. I even bought the camera module upgrade back in September (which was delivered waaaay after the initial date) and asked if they would take them back as I don’t use the phone anymore…of course the won’t do that. This is very very very annoying.

Assume users “with fault” are equally distributed.
Now devide FP-Users in two groups: “Forum” and “Non Forum”.
So “All” = “Forum” + “Non Forum”.
Now you calculate the partition where the percentage of phones with fault for all users F, for “Forum” Users A and “Non Forum” users B.

F * “All” = A * “Forum” + B * “Non Forum”.
Then we get F = (A*“Forum” + B*“Non Forum”)/“All”. (1)

With the poll we’d approximate A*“Forum”.
Assuming we know “All” we just don’t know B*“Non Forum”.
The assumption was “with fault” is equally distributed, therefore we assume A=B.
We also get “Non Forum” = “All” - “Forum”.
Now we know B*“Non Forum”.
With formula (1) we now get an educated guess for F.

Or more easily A=B=F.

Obviously a lot of things are not clear. But equal distribution is reasonable (why would the part of faulty phones change through demografics?).

Anyways. One pole is better than no pole.

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How so?
Users with faulty devices should be much more probable to hit the forums in search for fixes, so distribution would not be equal, and the view in the forums would be skewed, but you wouldn’t know just how heavily skewed.

But it’s an academic exercise anyway.
It shouldn’t really matter how wide-spread an issue might perhaps be. Issues need to be resolved no matter whether it’s one single customer having them or any large number.
The customers have rights, resellers have rights (if involved), Fairphone have rights.
In the end it’s boring unromantic legal stuff that matters, which gets blanked out or blurred often enough for idealistic reasons (as commendable as they may be).

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Ask again, they will offer a refund based on when you first report your problem to the support. This is a extract from an email I received the 20th of January :
"

  1. Purchase your device back according to our depreciation scheme.

    Purchase date: end of September 2019.
    Purchase value in 2019: €450
    Contact customer support: end of August 2020.
    Based on the device’s age (11 months at the moment of your request) we estimate a refund of €220
    Did you contact customer support for this issue prior to August 2020? If so, please, just tell me the email or the ticket number and I will adjust the date.

  2. I can ask for approval to swap your device with a new one.

"
You got to keep in asking. As long as the phone does not work, you still have the possibility to get money back. That is because of the guarantee. They may apply a fee, based on how long it took between when you received the phone and when you started complaining

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I’m also not so convinced about half/half distribution.
I do think people complain more that saying they are happy.
But on the other hand, I don’t think close to 1/2 of the people would go to the forum. I would suspect 10% max of the user go to the forum.
I have no way to back that up.

One way would be to get first how many FP3 are sold.

They hopped 43K by end of 2019. Using proportionality, and starting date sale being early september 2019 (in France only I believe), that would be 43K per trimestre, that is 43*5 (5 trimester since sept 2019). 215k units. On can argue that many phones were sold at the beginning, when it just came out. Let’s take a margin and divide by 2, that is around 100k FP3.

How many people are on the forum ?

@dornhe Using math is cool !

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Good criticism. Accepted.

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Let us say the initial sails burst accounts for 43k/2=21.5k phones.
Then we get 21.5k phones per trimester.
Ten we get 21.5k * 5 + 21.5k = 129k phones.

Note that 5 trimester means this trimester included.

taking the average of both methods gives
(129k + 107) / 2 = 118K

Considering the 10% of user being on the forum, that is wild guess, and reality is probably much less. Are they 11.8K people on the forum as a whole (FP 2 and 3) ?

There are in total 22972 users. Go to “users” in the menu. Next to the search bar is the number.
Good guess, you were off by pretty much factor 2 :laughing:

Has FP an annual financial publication?

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what’s the ratio FP2/FP3 users ?
Considering half/half, it’s 11k FP3 user (I think less, coz FP2 is been around longer)
We get back to a rough estimate of 10%

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Yes. Nice. The puzzle reveals itself :slight_smile:

At the same time one can expect the growth of FP balance the FP3/FP2 ration. I remember people not buying FP2, because they wanted FP3.

This statement by @Bas_tien doesn’t make sense to me.

I would think it is incorrect, as in, “if they can’t fix the phone remotely” then you can send it in for repair, it does not mean you will get a replacement phone, as in " swap the phone" :slight_smile:

A very recent tip from the german thread on sound problems:
It seems, that for at least two users the problem was solved by using another app:
Simple Dialer
This app is available from F-Droid, which is another plus. Just follow the link.
One user has reported, that he hasn’t got any troubles for more than six weeks now.
I hope this will help at least some of you too.

If that should indeed help, please report it to support as well, as this might help finding the root cause of the problem.

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I saw this one too.
I installed Simple Dialer yesterday. Made it the main app for calling. Then I cleared the cache of the regular dialer and uninstalled it.
The first few calls seem to improve voice quality.
I’ll give an update after a few days

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