This Fairphone 5 Review is Going to Make Me Very Unpopular

Linus couldn’t wait to trade in his LG Wing for the new Fairphone 5! Ethically produced, sustainable, and easily repaired? What’s not to like? Well…

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

FOLLOW US
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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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00:00 Intro
1:23 It’s So Cool!
2:03 It's not all roses
4:04 How’d it do?
6:06 You talking to me?
7:00 He’s a special boy
8:53 Not so bright
12:36 Outro

[AegrusYT]

Only real unfair comparison I saw being made was the battery removal. Even as someone who likes to tinker around with my laptop/PC, removing the backplate with suction cups and getting the battery out are far, far more annoying and 'sketchy' than just popping off both like you can do with the Fairphone.

[not_rap]

seeing un bearded linus insponsor segments gives me chills

[TheKoladis]

To be fair, 90% of people put one sim card and a 128gb sdcard for the entire duration of owning the phone

[hk]

2:30 I used to work at walmart around the photo center and have seen tons of sd cards corrupting due to the people not ejecting it in the settings before removing it. Android is outstandingly bad at handling file systems on removable drives. If you make it so you have to power off the phone in order to remove the card then this won't be as much of an issue.

[Gigahawk]

8:40 its completely plausible for the phantom headphone to be a soldering defect.

The way headphone detection usually works is a physical switch that gets opened/closed when you insert the plug. This signal will be routed to some input pin (on the CPU, or maybe the amp chip or something) which controls where audio is routed.
On a phone without a headphone jack, this input will usually be connected to a resistor that forces the "no headphone" mode.

If that solder connection to the resistor is flaky, the value of the input may behave erratically.

As for why the issue goes away on reboot, the input is probably whats known as Schmitt triggering, which just means it requires the voltage signal to cross over a threshold before the input actually switches. This is quite common for preventing erratic switching if there is noise on the input. What you're probably seeing is a random spike of noise thats enough to flip the input to "headphone connected" mode, but the signal never dips back the other way far enough to switch back to "no headphone" mode. By rebooting the phone you reset the state of the input and the issue goes away.

Note that from a software perspective there's no reason why such an input pin needs to exist at all, obviously the mode could just be hard coded in software. It could be that they have prototypes or devboards that include a headphone jack. It could also have been more work to do this in software vs routing a resistor to a dummy input. Maybe they're using an upstream audio driver that needs such an input assigned to it, or maybe this code is shared with older Fairphones that still have a headphone jack.

EDIT: as pointed out by @AndrewStrydomBRP, hardware would be necessary to support USB-C audio accessory mode (passive USB-C to headphone jack dongles).
Conveniently Fairphone has schematics publicly available (wish Linus mentioned this), where we can see U2602 is an audio/USB2 switch that handles this functionality. Annoyingly the part number listed on the chip appears to be a Fairphone internal part, and they appear to have not provided a BOM like they did with the Fairphone 4 (very cringe). In any case, some googling leads me to believe it's probably an FSA4480, which has a CC_IN pin used to detect whether headphones (or a dongle) is detected, which is presumably where the issue is. For communicating this status upstream to the CPU there's a DET pin and also the I2C interface, not sure which is being used, but the DET pin could also be the issue if that's being used.
To Linus, it would be worth checking if the headphone issue can also be resolved by plugging in something into the USB port, like a charger via a C-C cable or a USB-C flash drive/dock, maybe in both orientations.

[maxd]

It is absolutely insane to even compare the repairability of cutting through adhesive (and don't forget to reapply it properly later) to just popping off the back cover. I can replace the USB C connector on my FP4 in under 5 minutes literally on the side of a road. When I was abroad my USB C connector broke and I simply express shipped a replacement, and when it arrived (pretty quickly) I was able to replace it in under 5 minutes with just a screwdriver. having an easily removable back is the difference between being able to DIY fix it on the road and having to buy a temporary phone (one that supports your SIM card, which is not trivial in some countries) and trying to limp along on it. I'll take the slightly thicker body (which I do not care about at all) and maybe not top of the line performance SoC if I have the power to literally fix nearly any easily breakable component of my phone on the go with minimal effort.

[flyngshp]

In my opinion, the price is the biggest problem. And it probably cannot be cheaper.
But that's what certified ethically sourced materials get you.

And I think it would only be fair to note in EVERY other phone review, that the materials used are probably not ethically sourced, which is why it can be that cheap.

[TomNook.]

"After removing the back, it's not that much harder to repair than the Note 5....other than using the isopropyl acohol to remove the adhesive..."

Uh yeah....

[Dan-uyld]

To be fair Linus made himself unpopular way before this review

[Nabalazs]

Had my FP5 since October. I didn't experience those audio issues. Though, the first week I've owned it, it did seem a bit fussy about actually transmitting audio through Bluetooth. But even without a software update, that behaviour just stopped.

The responsiveness and performance section of this video was very warranted though. But for a different reason. I use it at 90hz, and I really like it. But it feels like sometimes scrolling turns to jelly, and responsiveness worsens, until you toggle the refresh rate down to 60, then back up to 90 (or just toggle the battery saver, it does the same thing). I'm perfectly happy with it's overall day to day performance. But it feels like, every couple of days, it needs to cough up a hairball and be patted on the back, before everything is back to normal.

Now that this video is out, I really want to write a big fat review on the Fairphone forums, addressing what I do and don't disagree with from this review.
The TLDR, is that fairphone made me dislike stock android, and I gained an appreciation for all the MiUI and Samsung skins out there. How are so many options and features and fixes and quality of life things missing from stock android??? I'd genuinely love to see someone who has more time than me, slap lineage OS on the Fairphone, and daily it for a while, to see how much it is just android holding the FP5 back

[stephanhuebner]

I own a FairPhone 5, and I'm not bothered by its size or weight. But I can acknowledge some of the problems Linus described (the terrible auto-dimming for example, which is so annoying that I disabled it). Also, the battery drain is horrendous. I am really lucky if I can get by one day without charging it, and sometimes, even during the night, when the phone isn't used at all, the battery level drops significantly. I even switched from 90 to 60 Hz (something I don't care for anyway) and disabled 5G, which seemed to help a bit.

Here's one Linus didn't mention: On rare occasions (maybe once or twice a month) "ghost" touches begin to appear, in pretty quick succession, so much so that it's impossible to reboot the phone. It usually helps to just put the phone to sleep for a moment, but not every time, and then I remove the battery to force restart the phone. I've read online that it may also help to disassemble the phone and put it back together again... But what kind of advice is that? It's not complicated, sure, but who's to say that said disassembly will help or won't introduce other problems?

Also, the loading of certain apps takes ages. On the Fairphone, there are one or two where I saw the splash screen for the first time, as it took that long for them to load.

All in all, I have to say that on a technical level and daily usability the Fairphone is clearly a setback. The only reason I accept these problems is their mission and their promises of rather long software support. Had it been a regular phone I would have sent it back.

[kuroodo_]

7:38 Isn't that just the vanilla android experience? My Pixel 7 does the same thing. To uninstall you need to drag it up, the uninstall option shows up then

[lukejabc]

I never got the whole thickness thing - like I’ve never bought a phone based on it being thinner then the rest

[amoenus_dev]

Never understood the chase for ever-thinner phones. I am not advocating for Energizer Power Max thickness, but in general make phones thicker, if that means larger and/or replaceable batteries

[mattwhite]

I don't consider changing the battery on a sealed back phone that's glued to the chassis the same as being able to hot swap a battery in a few seconds. The value add there isn't that you can replace the battery when its end of life. Its that you can replace it with a hot spare on the go and never be left with a flat battery. I used to carry a spare battery handy when I had an S4. Swapping it on the go was awesome.

[oldrandomcomputing]

I'm still not happy that they removed the headphond jack.

[logan]

side power button finger print sensors are the biggest thing i miss in phones. even if face id or in screen fingerprint sensors are instantaneous, i can have a phone with a side (or back) button fingerprint sensor on before its even out of my pocket simply by locating the button by feel

[shadowtheimpure]

The long press not presenting an uninstall is a vanilla Android thing starting at 14 I think, same with the Google search bar being permanently locked there. If they are using stock Android, that would explain those two 'pain points' you experienced. For me, as a Pixel user, I have long since grown accustomed to such things.

[AlexEarMusic]

I am a big fan of the Fairphone and I am a first week adopter. I not only switched to the FP5, but also switched from Apple to Android - mostly for sustainability and repairability reasons. They want 120€ for a new battery on an iPhone 12 Pro (lol).

Here are some discoveries I made during my time. I see that this phone is way slower than my iPhone. It is sometimes jittery while losing apps, takes a few seconds to switch from landscape to portrait when watching videos and such. That being said, I do not feel like it is a big letdown on day to day. I am not a power user, mostly watching YouTube, messaging and such. I do not feel like it is a big letdown.

Most critical, I had issues with the screen just flat out freezing once a week. Everything in the background still worked fine, but sleep and wake did not work. Had to power down the phone and restart to get it to work again. This problem has not appeared for weeks and I guess it was a silent fix in one of the latest updates.

Also the auto-dimming is pure dog shit, as Linus said. I turn it down most of the time. Had my screen flicker because of it and had to restart to make it disappear (restarts are a big thing with the FP5)

I do not feel the same way about the vibration and I never have my phone on loud. Never had the audio glitch happen to me either.

The SD-card is a big let down for me too, because I use the FP5 as a hi res player.

I actually love the big size as well as the bezels, since I accidentally pressed something on my iPhone constantly just by holding it and touching the sides of the display.

Quick charge is great, though I wished they would just release an external battery charger. This way I could own three batteries and just switching them out while on the go.

When taking pictures I was mostly happy with the results, though I rarely use the camera for more than a quick snapshot in Snapchat or WhatsApp. I have a dedicated mirrorless camera for anything serious.

The phone had a weird glitch where it takes like 10 seconds to hear someone on the other end of a WhatsApp call initially, though that could be on Metas side.

Overall, the FP5 has been getting better with every update and most of the glitches got better or disappeared completely. I expect the phone to become better with time. I really like it and I am looking forward to not paying bullshit prizes when something breaks.

[RenAigu]

I kinda don't like that the product isn't named in the title or clearly readable in the thumbnail