The fairphone is abolutely useless as a Navigation System. As i discovered this, i was really disapointed, because navigating with a Smartphone is really important for me.
All other things work fine and i can not complain about much.
When i consider, that every cheap and shabby smartphone can be used for navigation, this is really a mess.
Did you try any of the solutions you can find when searching for âgpsâ on the forum? There are many posts about GPS/Navigation problems and most are fixable.
Yes, i did. But (sorry to say) thats all nonsense. All these so called fixes do not and can not help against the main problem - the mediatek chipset - which seems to be unable to calculate correct position data out of the incoming raw gps data.
I tried an external gps receiver which i connected via bluetooth quite easily (one of the advantages of the FP) and got the same problem. And the problem is not the time of getting a gps fix. The problem is, that the phone looses the correct position information again and again during the trip. You can drive a hundred kilometers an suddenly you find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
This weekend, i drove two hundred kilometers, using three different systems at the same time: the Fairphone, an Android tablet and an iPhone 4. All with the same Navigation Software. I think you can imagine what happened.
I must say, this is really annoying.
Gravity box can fix this.
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@paulakreuzer has pulled together a useful guide to help fix GPS issues - at the bottom of this there is a link to Gravity box (you need to install xposed too) and this has a fix for the problem youâve described. Itâs a module built specifically for Mediatek devices
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It would be nice if this fix was done by a Fairphone update. They apparently know the problem.
As a normal user (not a software programmer or similar savvy), I do not understand al this. I dont want to install Xposed and Gravity box, as I dont know what problems that could originate.
So it should be Fairphones responsibility to fix this problem.
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Maybe it is legally not possible for them to modify their software. Couldnât that be a reason?
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Whatever the reason is, @baaje is right. It is fairphones task, to solve such problems. And if they want to reach as much people as possible with their philosophie of selling a fair phone, they must create a device, that should work with such elementary functions.
It is more than ten years ago, that i made my first experience with gps navigation. Everything worked amazingly. And now, ten years later, we recognize, that things get even worser.
Since the 1.6 (or was it the 1.8??) update GPS works fine for me (I use TomTom), without any âfixesâ. Before that this was indeed a major issue for me.
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1.8 fixes the time-to-first-fix problems with the FairPhone, but I agree that while getting a first fix is no longer an issue, I still get the problem that sometimes the GPS is just a hundred meters or more off from my current location. And I have the GravityBox fix enabled.
For me is not the navigator, it works just fine or at least fine enough. If it sometimes think I am driving on a nearby road it is really not an issue because I usually know there I am as long as it restricts to what I can see with my eyes.
The biggest disappointment for me is instead the lack of flashplayer as many web pages needs it and the problem with the near field sensor resulting in active touch screen during calls resulting in hanging up calls.
You can download and install Flash as described here:
Not all browser apps support Flash, though. Dolphin does, and I think thereâs a plugin for Firefox as well.