Well I think I can contribute to that. I used FP3+ for my daily driver since two weeks.
The Phone
Its heavy, its chunky, its a brick. Nobody can deny that. However this has some advantages: no slippery phone anymore. I personnaly like that. My last phone I loved was the Lumia 950. RIP Windows phone. The FP3+ is big and the buttons on the left side need some acclimatization time.
The fingerprint sensor is too high and too small. You can read this in other reviews. It’s a good feeling that you can replace many modules if they break. The screen is ok. Personally I don’t mind the bars at the top and bottom. My son said spontaneously: Daddy, finally you have an iPhone (which I would never do)!
The sound quality while calling is at the lower end. If you are used to Nokia or high class phones, you will notice the difference. But it works and serves its purpose.
The reception of the mobile phone signal is only ok and could be better. But also here the FP3+ is in the midd range.
Now we come to the camera. It is a bit difficult to write something about the camera, because it depends very much on the camera app and how it plays out the advantages of the camera module.
My user behavior is important here. Besides the many functions of a smartphone, the camera is almost the most important one for me. And unfortunately I am disappointed. You can see that it has a strong sensor. But the default camera app of /e/ is simply - excuse my French - bad. And I mean really very bad. The pictures are noisy, no matter if in daylight or in bad lighting conditions. The contrast is too high in the default settings, etc.
So I downloaded OpenCamera and the results are a bit better. But not much better. Unfortunately I don’t have the possibility to test the Fairphone Camera App in the original and I would be interested if the results are better or worse. My feeling tells me that they are much better. Too bad that /e/ did not have the possibility to port the original Camera App. Really very sad.
Insert: Well, what can I say, I used “NGCam_7.4.104-v1.8-fix.apk” (see below) as Camera App and… amazing! I usually would NEVER recomend to anyone to download apk’s from other sources than official app-stors or at least f-droid standard repo’s. However this does the job. Really, really good. Please, please dear /e/-Team, try to use a fork of this or similar as deafault.
Let’s get to the operating system.
/e/ does a lot of things right - but you can clearly see that it is in beta stage. Often I unlock the phone and then realize that the icons are all moved. It is completely unclear why. The fingerprint sensor does not work reliably, but that does not bother me.
Interesting is what makes /e/ different than e.g. lineageOS. Besides the FP3+ I use a OnePlus 6T with lineageOS 16.1. Some apps that run on the OnePlus do not run on /e/ and vice versa. This is confusing, but since there are much more apps running on /e/ than on LOS it is ok.
Some apps activate eSpeak and cause the apps and eSpeak to crash. For whatever reason. For example the default camera app.
Interesting are the following things concerning security. The default settings do not give the apps any rights at first. This is good. Why an operating system that is designed for data security microG has implemented is completely unclear to me. I think it has the opposite effect on the security of the data usage.
Funny side: /e/ uses for support Telegram-Messenger - one of the most unsecure Messengers on this planet. Don’t get me wrong but this is hillarious. Why not install Threema by default?
What is really fun and convinces me: the /e/ team has developed a lot to make a de-googled cell phone possible and to save the user the installation of lineageOS. It would be nice if /e/ would bring this knowledge back to the community with the release of a LineageOS for FP3+.
The FP3+ with /e/ is a solid smartphone and offers the possibility to move around (almost - see above) without Google. Cheers! Good job!
@Bristow concerning the price: remember this is the actual price for a smartphone. The prices you get with custom-Googled-Android phones includ selling your data. So smartphones in the 500 € pice range cost much more in production, keep children in slavery and contribute massively to pollution and climate change. Isn’t it worth to pay the real price for a phone to do a little better?