Fairphone

Recently, my old phone broke: The screen of my beloathed Samsung S21 just would stay black (still react to touch, but that’s not that useful if you can’t manage to unlock it). So I needed a new phone. I quickly settled on the Fairphone, I didn’t like how Samsung messed up Android design and bugs wise, so I wanted something close to stock. Nothing was quickly excluded because they are huge, Pixel because the G in Google stands for genocide Project Nimbus. here are my thoughts:

the good

Overall, the phone is decent.

I really like the dark green color, and the overall look of the phone. It feels very nice to hold in the hand (with or without the soft cover). The yellow switch on the side(I’ve remapped it to toggle do-not-disturb) is fun to use (very tactile!), although I rarely use it.

It’s nice to have stock-ish android again, I much prefer the design over whatever Samsung was doing. It’s also nice not to have two copies of every app, the bad Samsung one and the Google one.

Battery life is good. I rarely have to charge mid-day, and the percentage goes down at a much more steady rate compared to the old S21.(On the Samsung, it would sometimes take like 20’ from 12% to 9%, and then two minutes for 9% to 4%...)

(I heard bad things about the performance, but I don’t see it. Everything runs well. The only apps crashing in the background are those which also did that on the old phone.)

the mixed-bag

The camera is decent. It’s noticeably worse that the flagship-level one I had before, but it still makes useable pictures. However, this is not true for videos. The sound quality is abhorrent! This is not an issue with the microphones, as video calls or videos made in other apps are fine tho. The biggest issue with the camera is that it sometimes loses a picture!? It sometimes shows a spinner “Processing” above the preview image (if you tap the little photo circle on the camera screen), which keeps spinning forever and the picture does not get saved. I’ve started taking screenshots of the preview to save the pictures now! This only happens occasionally, but it is still very bad for it to essentially delete a picture sometimes.

The automatic brightness was a bit erratic in the beginning. (It has now learned!) Sadly, there is no way to have the slider be visible on the notifications screen, so adjusting it needs two swipes down :/

the bad

Cellular data sometimes just breaks? Every now and then it claims to be connected, but nothing loads. This sometimes fixes itself after a while, but sometimes it needs a restart.

The always on screen is often too bright, and the brightness is not adjustable. There also is no way of turning it off easily (no quick settings tile) which is not ideal for e.g. the cinema or at night.

the ugly

The status bar icons are bad.

1. Why are the wifi and mobile connection icons so big? Why do they not match the material icons used by everything else? The “LTE” is huge! (Thankfully I usually have 5G)
2. What are the WiFi-Calling and VoLTE icons doing??
   1. They’re both ugly, incomprehensible, and almost indistinguishable.The phone-in-circle one is WiFi-Calling, the phone-in-teardrop is VoLTE.
   2. They serve no purpose (I do not care! 3G is being shut off soon anyway, so non-VoLTE should almost never happen anymore)
   3. Why is the VoLTE one badly spaced and almost touches whatever is to its left?
3. The battery icon is plain bad. The gray fill is hard to see on colored backgrounds. The text is too small.(and the text is necessary because due to the contrast and small size its otherwise even harder to see how full it is) The icons for power saving or charging are too small.

the conclusion

Overall, I’m happy with the phone. It’s not perfect, but it was also relatively cheap, so I can’t fault it for not being a flagship class phone.

:D