I was happy with Fairphone 4 when I got it new with Android 11. And now my great device is really just a construction site. Nothing works properly anymore. I canāt listen to music properly, the launcher just looks broken, I recently got Ghost Touch. It is felt that all āsmallerā manufacturers patch their devices broken. The wife and child have an A53 and A52s that just run smoothly. And my Fairphone 4 cost more than both togetherā¦ how am I supposed to be happy with it in this condition?
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Good summary. Far too many fundamental design issues make the FP4 the potential albatross that FP thought could never beā¦
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Could you please discuss issues in the dedicated issue topic instead in this general one.
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Iām very satisfied. My previous phone was a fp2, which was very unstable, both hardware and software. Iām a ālightā user, i.e. I am not technically skilled. There seems to be a lot of discussion here about the phoneās specifications.
To me it seems logical that the specs for the fp are less than a ānormalā phone in the same price range. You pay for sustainability and fair trade. With state of the art hardware, the phone would become way too expensive for people like me (as a hospital worker). So Iām happy.
The only problems I have with my phone started just recently, after installing bitdefender antivirus and vpn suite. Feels like bitdefender slows down and sometimes screws up the system. For the rest it works just like any other Android device.
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I vote unsatisfied.
Ghost inputs are getting worse
Last update was crap
And i really feel Fairphone is just focused on marketingā¦
And blind to complaints.
I had to re-type this a few times just because of the ghost in my phone.
Good ideaā¦and if faults are taken out itās greatā¦
But as long as itās not i am getting more and more dissatisfied.
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This is something I expected, but honestly I didnāt expect the camera to be worse than the camera of a phone half the price of the Fairphone 4 on release.
Aside from that, I can live with most of the downsides. The screen not being OLED is a bit weird, but I get it. It needs to be user-replaceable. That racks up the cost.
98% of all issues I have with the FP4 are hardware related.
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tough one. In the beginning I was satisfied with the FP4. Sure, it is too expensive for what it is, even if you factor in the āfair & repair taxā, but for me it does (or better ādidā) what itās supposed to do. I like the size, design and haptics, I like that I can change the batteries, I like that there is support for custom roms.
There are also things that bugged me from the beginning. Most prominently, the removal of the headphone jack. I hate it. Seriously. I mean, I get it, nowadays phones with headphone jacks are a rarity, but still, I hate it.
I also didnāt like the performance of the display that much. Itās ā¦ okish, but again, for the price it should be better. I could live with that. But with the bug they introduced with A13, the phone has become unusable in certain situation since it makes the not so-good-display even worse.
So overall I would say I am very unsatisfied, up to the point I am actively looking for a replacement. Although my criticism is less with the FP4 itself, than with the software support and the company Fairphone. They do not deliver on their promises and donāt live up to their own standards. If they claim to support their phone for that many years, if they promise to build products to reduce waste, than they have to deliver products that actually work. And you have to provide timely security updates and bug fixes. And if there are bugs that basically breaks the device, they have to get this sorted out fast (and not in months or years! seriously ā¦).
I like the idea, I think it is an important undertaking that we really need. But at this point I highly doubt that FP is the company that is able to actually deliver, to solve these problems, to live up to the expectations.
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Slightly dissatisfied.
Poor software support. FP4 was slow to upgrade to android 12. And a bit behind upstream updates
It a little bit large.
Poor security due to using ASOP public signing keys. Partly the reason GrapheneOS doesnāt support Fairphone.
Hotspot partly not working.
I do like the repairability, not much of bloatware, SD-card. Iāll might change to a Pixel phone due to GrapheneOS or maybe maybe Fairphone 5 with CalyxOS. Depends on the reviews and support. Iāll probably keep it for another year atleast.
Better software support and meeting GrapheneOS standards. Then it would be almost perfect.
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Unsatisfied. I really like the principles behind the Fairphone, and long software support is really important to me, but the deal breaker for me is the audio. Itās too tinny. No bass, making music sound poor. No treble which makes speech harder to understand. āSā sounds are particularly bad.
I was listening to a radio stream this morning where they said Meta are launching a Twitter rival called āFritzā. Stupid name for a service, I thought. After suffering a few awful sounding songs I switched to my old Nokia 6.1. The audio isnāt great on that phone either, but I can live with it. When the next news bulletin came on I realized the new service is called āThreadsā not āFritzā. Sound quality matters.
I only got the Fairphone yesterday, so Iāll be returning it. I use my phone for too many podcasts to put up with audio this poor. Itās the most expensive phone Iāve ever bought, but the worst sound from any smartphone. At these prices, it needs to be better.
I filled out a long post in a support ticket in the My Fairphone app so they at least know why Iām unsatisfied. Submitting it failed. I forget the exact words but words to the effect of āSomething went wrong. Try again laterā.
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Welcome to the Fairphone community.
What audio device are you using with your FP4?
No extra device, just the speakers in the phone.
Ok, I donāt expect anything from these āloudspeakersā, for me a headphone or external speakers are mandatory for listening to music.
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I totally agree. At first I was really happy with my FP4, but that changed these last months.
- there is a bug in the screen brightness outdoors, and you almost canāt see anything on the screen when sun is shining. I really hate the fact this isnāt solved yet
- since a few months, my fp4 randomly crashes and reboots. Often at the same locations. When connected to Android Auto, it crashes the entire car unit, and you canāt use Android Auto again after the phone reboots. You just have to park the car, and leave for about 15 minutes, then it works again. I thought it was a problem with my cables or my car, but that wasnāt the case, because my wife uses a Samsung and has never had this with the same cables and same car. It took me a long while to investigate the cause, but finally I found the reason: 5G. In Belgium, 5G is introduced at more and more places, so the problem of crashes is also increasing. I solved it by disabling 5G on my FP4, but that is just not the way it has to be fixed. It is software related, so Fairphone must fix this. I bought this phone to be 5G capable!
- Camera quality is just bad. When I bought this phone, I could live with the pictures it makes. But, when you compare it to other smartphones, it really makes you feel sad you canāt make such pics. I stopped taking family pictures with my phone, instead I use the Samsung phone of my wife. I tried using Gcam instead of the stock camera, because the software of gcam makes better pics. But, that also doesnāt work quite well. Sometimes the screen goes black, and you canāt take pictures anymore. Only way to solve it is to reboot the phone. By then, the moment you tried to capture is long gone.
For these 3 cases there is a topic on this forum. So, I know I am not alone with these problems. I also reported them at Fairphone support, but they havenāt solved any of the bugs to this date.
I really like the whole idea about fairphone, and convinced my company to only buy Fairphones. But now, with all the bugs, every employee that has a fairphone is complaining about it.
So overall: at first this was a good phone, but the updates broke it.
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Iām unsatisfied because using the 5ghz WiFi is not possible with this phone. It will always disconnect and I even tried to separate the 2,4 and 5ghz network. Also I expected the camera being more good for this price range of phone. If there would be another phone that makes the repairability as good as FP I would have changed already.
Satisfied, but would love to have minijack.
Did you contact Fairphone about this???