To be honest, as I note above, I’m selling this because:
- I need a very reliable phone, and this just hasn’t been that. People have complained, and I am not in a position to ignore the complaints.
- I need better battery life, and the ability to change the SIM without turning off the phone and removing a brittle and breakable part.
- I also need a camera that is more reliable; I had expected the mediocre camera would not be as much of a problem for me as it turned out to be, particularly because the extremely poor focus, lag, and shutter speed selection tend to make quick photos I take for reference turn out unreadable or unusable.
- I bought the FP4 after really enjoying my Framework laptop; I didn’t spend enough time looking at this forum to realize just how different the two companies and communities are. Fairphone as a company is simply not helpful and supportive in the way that Framework is, and this forum is not the supportive community and resource that the Framework forum is. While the above problems were frustrating, the confidence I gained that they would not be fixed by Framework, and the unhelpfulness of this forum, with its giant threads, defence of Fairphone, and continual responses of “contact support” when, in almost every case, the person saying that must know that contacting support will have no real chance of helping, given past experience, was what caused me to finally be fed up with the phone.
I’ve used the phone primarily with Google Fi, in Southern California. In the locations where I’ve used it, it appears to always be a T-mobile MVNO. I’ve been using a physical Google Fi SIM. I’ve also occasionally used it roaming with an Irish Vodafone SIM, which also connects to T-mobile. Once I installed LineageOS, it has worked reasonably in comparison to how well it works in Europe. In terms of problems:
- On some occasions, I’ve had the known glitch where, on initially booting the phone, the speakerphone needs to be turned on and off before the microphone works during calls. I’ve also had this in Europe.
- Before installing LineageOS, I had the frequent problem, also in Albuquerque, NM, where VoLTE meant that I could hear the other side of a call, but the other side could not hear me. I do not appear to have had this with LineageOS, however.
- I was not able to call my dentist. The call simply wouldn’t go through, and calls from them didn’t seem to connect, though texts did. I didn’t have this problem with anyone else. He tends to be a bit technology-obsessed, and his office appears to have an unusual phone setup, possibly an unusual VoIP system (eg, they were sending texts on their office phone).
- People on the other side complain about sound quality on Signal and WhatsApp, but this is also the case in Europe. It is usable, however; it does not have the earlier problem where calls were almost inaudible.
- It has, of course, the usual LineageOS caveats: an unlocked bootloader, with the ensuing warnings, and SafetyNet failure unless you install the universal safteynet fix (this does work on the phone in my experience) or ih8sn.