What are people’s experiences with the fairphone (4) in regards to build quality?
Apologies, rant ahead of my frustrations with it
I bought mine second hand and had to replace the battery immediately (maybe previous owner treated it badly)
The mic stopped working recently, which I kind of fixed by taking it apart, cleaning it out and putting it all back together but it’s still dodgey
Charger port no longer works without me jamming the charger in and holding it there
Also again from the start the actual horsepower behind it seems insufficient to run the version of android it came with smoothly sometimes, meaning at some point soon I’m going to have to replace it just so it can keep up.
It’s great that I can fix these problems by getting replacement parts rather than replacing the whole phone, but it’s getting expensive really quickly and I’m not sure I trust their build quality given how much has broken right off the bat
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Been the opposite experience for me with my Fairphone 3. I bought it for the reparability but the fucking thing refuses to break, no matter how much I mishandle it.
The same experience, sadly (Fairphone 2). I also bought mine used (so it may have had a long life before that), replaced the battery, and shortly after had enough components fail at the same time to make it not worth fixing. Mostly touchscreen problems and slowness. Shortly after I moved to a new country and found it couldn’t connect to the cell network there (even with a new SIM card) so that was the end of it.
It’s a real shame, I love the concept of it
Mine works perfectly after two years. The microphone placement is a little wonky as it is on the left side to the screen (why?). This results in me placing my finger over it frequently which fucks the audio.
It is pretty fast and I never have issues with running any apps or android. My battery is also good.
For your charging port, have you cleaned the inside with a toothpick? Usb c ports getting gunked up is inevitable.
That being said, there was a famous problem with ghost touches on the touchscreen. I had this too, but after an update it was “fixed” with software. So whenever the ghost touches occur, the phone discards the input. That does mean no more random inputs but sometimes an unresponsive screen. So not really a perfect solution.
This issue had thousands of requests on the fairphone forum. However the response from fairphone was slow and inadequate. For such a relatively expensive phone I expected more.
Charger port not working without jamming the charger in just sounds like pocket-lint to me. Has happened once every year or two with almost every phone I’ve ever owned. Grab a really thin needle, turn the phone off, unplug the battery, and GENTLY scrape the border of the USB-C port out. It’ll probably fix the charging port issue. Always has for me.
