Out of curiosity (@DoraXP made me think of it in this post) I researched a bit on the matter of smartphone failures and warranty and discovered this article from 2010 (I did not read all of it).
It states:
So, assuming that the FP1/FP1U has similar drop-out-rates as the iPhone 4, about 1,260 (out of 60,000) of the phones sold in 2014 would be erratic in the first year of their usage.
The spectrum goes up to 6,7%:
For Fairphone this would be over 4,020 (out of 60,000).
I thought this would be interesting to share. If someone wants to read the whole article, it would be interesting to hear your comments!
The article has caveats and limitations, which is understandable, given that the source is a specific warranty / repair company, and that claims and reports made directly to the manufacturer / supplier are not included. However, in the case of FP, who are the sole supplier and contact point for phones, this would not be an issue. In the principles of transparency and openness, it would be interesting to see the actual failure / defect rates for the 58000 FPs produced.
How are the defective unit data collated and assessed by FP? Can the unit’s S/N be traced to the date of manufacture? Is there a higher incidence of defects on a specific date? Are there specific defect types and failure modes more prevalent than others? Does FP have access to the batch manufacturing records?
I will say that I have had to revert to my almost 5 year old HTC Desire and my 8 year old Sony Ericsson K750i, which, despite being out of date, they are still fit for the original purpose they were built for and have never failed me.
I really think that FairPhone should make a statement on whether it has conducted an investigation into the the high failure rates seen, what the outcome of it was, how they can prevent repeat incidents and how the consumer is not going to lose faith in the product and how they are going to be protected in case of reocurrence.
In any case, it’s a manufacturing defect and a 2 year warranty applies.
It’s not really “high failure rates” if about 200 people on the forum write about their issues with the touch screen. I think there are two phenomena:
People, who have a working FP don’t come to the forum to report issues.
You normally don’t see people complaining in e.g. Samsung forums because if there is a problem, the people (have to) go to their reseller, which most times is an electronics company like Media Markt or similar. Samsung itself is not responsible for taking warranty requests. In our case Fairphone has to because they are the reseller.
Bottom line: We don’t hear much of the people, who are perfectly happy with their FPs.
I know it’s a small sample size, but I know 3 FP owners in person. 2 out of 3 had this issue.
People do say that they are happy with their FPs. They won’t do that on a topic on problems or bugs though.
I can imagine there is also a lot of other stuff going on currently. We will be happy about numbers any time the information is available – be it in a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. Thanks
(translates to summer hole)
