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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there’s a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I’ve never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



  • Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.

    And I wouldn’t really call the design “that bad”, I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.



  • I have a Fairphone 5 and it’s… ok. It’s definitely overpriced for its specs but you can’t really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It’s also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that’s why I switched), it’s a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I’ll pull it out of my pocket and it’s mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I’ve had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn’t allow you to open the keyboard again. It’s also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that’s probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.

    The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don’t expect the polish you’ll get out of a Samsung flagship, you’ll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don’t regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn’t really worth the money.








  • I had an old galaxy a5 with a badly degraded battery sitting around. A few weeks ago I had nothing better to do so I opened it (breaking the glass back in the process because of how strongly it was glued), ripped the battery out and soldered a charging cable straight to the phone’s battery contacts. It now lives on a phone stand in my car, connected to a bluetooth OBD2 scanner and I use it to show a couple of additional gauges like oil temperature, instant fuel economy and engine load while driving. The 12v output provides just enough power for the phone to reliably run and with the lack of battery I don’t have to worry about it exploding if it sits in the sun for hours. I haven’t found a way to make it turn on as soon as it gets power, so it’s mildly annoying to turn it on manually every time I start the car, but I can live with that.