I’ve been using my Fairphone 4 since the beginning of the year, and I always intended to write a forum post containing what I liked (in order to motivate you) and disliked (in order to cause you more work).
Let me start with the positive feedback. Having never owned a smartphone, I was blown away by the possibilities offered by the phone. I now downloaded a Chemistry app which displays the periodic table (including atomic masses, evaporation temperature and so forth), an astronomy app which I can point at the sky to see the heavenly constellations, and it also decomposes any large natural into irreducibles quite nicely.
Now for the constructive feedback, excluding those remarks which I already made at the testing Telegram group.
First of all, I think that the /e/ team should advertise one of the most important advantages of /e/ much more aggressively: The battery running time literally TRIPLED when I installed /e/! (I had to use it without /e/ one one occasion, before /e/ for FP4 was released.)
Second, there are some minor issues with the German translation. I’d be happy to assist if that is desired.
Third, the WLAN hotspot does work on occasion and for a while, but most of the time the connection goes away quickly.
In addition, I’ve made a feature request with another idea, and I’m going to issue two more shortly after posting this post.
So thanks very much for this awesome OS! It does not rock (this is a compliment, I’m into Classical & Jazz)!
Hi Adrimedes,
Regarding the hotspot instability, I got at first the same feeling until I realized that the hotspot is by default turned off when the connected device disconnects (which my laptop does automatically on a regular basis). You might have the same here. On my fp4 the hotspot connection has been fairly stable otherwise.
Hope this helps!
I’m using Stellarion. Unfortunately, there seems to have been bloatware, which did not seem to have a devastating effect though, apart from the battery running low. The meaning is that I was aware of it.
Well, have to say - I bought Fairphone 4 and it’s one of the worst phones I ever had. And I had like 30 of them. Quality of materials is absolutely disgusting, speckle green verision is just black one sprayed over with green coating which gets worn off after one month of using. They do not sell most of the spare parts for the phone neither, if you manage to destroy phone’s midframe, you have to buy a new phone or send it to FP and have it swaped with whole new motherboard for €250+
Speaker makes cracking noises so making a call without handsfree is virtualy imposible. On the top, Fairphone got HW restrictions on camera, Camera2API is locked/incomplete. This is acknowledged by FP, but they refuse to fix it or even comment on it, it looks like intended actually.
Will go for OnePlus next month and throw away this wanabe-fair hipster garbage. Or maybe sell it if anybody is interested, PM me, will not ask more than €300 as the midframe is damaged and I don’t feel like anything more is reasonable price even for a brand new unit.