Phone dropped → touchscreen broken?

Help Fairphone 1
16

As I mentioned above, I found a way to resize my display. I wrote a guide on how to do so which can be found in the DroidWiki (in German).
See a brief step-by-step guide below. This works with the Fairphone 1, because it runs on Android 4.2. For the Fairphone 2 the commands are a little different - see either this post on StackExchange (English) or the [HowTo in the DroidWiki]((https://www.droidwiki.org/wiki/Displayauflösung_verringern_bzw._defekten_Bereich_des_Touchscreens_deaktivieren) (German).)
In summary, the steps are:

  1. Activate on-screen buttons (by adding the line qemu.hw.mainkeys=0 to the file /system/build.prop (requires root permission)
  2. Install ADB-Tools on your Computer
  3. Enable USB-Debugging on your phone
  4. Connect the phone via USB to your computer
  5. Resize the display resolution from 540x900 to eg. 540x700 (depends on how much of your touchscreen is broken)
    adb shell am display-size 540x700
    can be reset with:
    adb shell am display-size reset
  6. It might be useful to adjust the display density from 240 to e.g. 230-200:
  7. adb shell am display-density 220
    can be reset with:
    adb shell am display-density reset

The problem with this method is that under Android 4.2 (the currently available version for the Fairphone 1) you can only resize the screen at the top and the bottom concurrently. Thus you loose space on one side of the screen.
The possibilities of resizing the screen are much more flexible for Android 4.3 and above (i.e. Fairphone 2). An upgrade to Android KitKat 4.4 had been announced on the Fairphone blog already last year in June, but since then there was neither an update on this news nor any response on the various questions from the community.

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