Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Review is Going to Make Me Very Unpopular”.
Before you grab your pitchforks, I am going to keep the fairphone 5 around. I am a big believer in their mission to build more repairable, more sustainable and more ethically sourced phones and with software updates, planned all the way through 2031. There is plenty of time for improvements, which is good because of things like this. What is this to be fair to fairphone? According to a January email, the two handsets that were delivered to us on August 31st. 2023 are final prototypes and not part of the retail production run that started shipping to customers. 2 weeks later, fairphone revealed that in the ramp up to full production, they turned up some cases of bad soldering, mic failures and antenna issues that were solved for the mass production run. So the units we evaluated aren’t technically mass production units, but none of the changes that fairphone disclosed were likely to impact our experience with the device.
Anyway, with that grain of salt out of the way, let’s just rip the Band-Aid off and tell you about our sponsor melric, their allnew boob 75 is a fully assembled Ultra customizable aluminum keyboard with pre- lubed magnetic switches and stabilizers. So you can Boogie all night long and by Boogie I mean use your cool keyboard, just listen to how good it sounds right out of the box. I was immediately enamored with the optional transparent back. It looks so cool, it’s plastic, so you don’t have to worry about it shattering and it effortlessly pops off.
So you can get to the battery and the rest of the guts. It’S like a little trick back in time, but in a really good way. Migration to the fairphone was painless and I love the fingerprint sensor being built into the power button on the side. Okay, that’s the oldfashioned way of doing things, but it is so much faster than an unders screen sensor, especially the one I was using on the LG Wing.
Speaking of oldfashioned, though, there is a lot going going on here, that’s less oh, quaint and more what year is it, for instance, peering through the transparent back, I found no obvious signs of wireless charging, and while it’s not the kind of thing that I use, that Often it still feels like a bit of a bummer and I feel the same way about the placement of the nano SIM and micro SD slots they are under the battery. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful they’re included at all, and the battery is not glued in making it super easy to remove. But why do I need to power down my phone in order to pop in an SD card? Flipping things over the display is fine. I guess I noticed a yellow tint to it when it’s off AIS, more than I’m used to seeing on a modern OLED and just like the fairphone 4. The bezels are as large as they are nonuniform with the top and bottom having at least an extra SE of thickness compared to the sides, though, that is nothing compared to the profile view of this B: bad boy, damn boy, damn boy, it’s about on par with My wife’s s23 Ultra and that’s with a dbrand protective case installed on it, and it comes with a weight to match. 212 G are about 7 and 1: half Freedom ounces.
At least we accounted for that when we designed our new LT lounge pants so comfy and available now at LTT store.com. You know what else feels like time travel. I can’t remember the last time I did a phone review and I felt like I needed to have a performance and responsiveness section I mean. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by more premium devices, but the fairphone 5 really did feel more.
Like my ancient note, 9 than a modern phone, we conducted our Labs testing, alongside both a pixel 8, which was chosen for its comparable price and a Galaxy Note 5 that had a new battery and a fresh install of lineage OS. In order to put the performance of the fairphone in the appropriate context – and that is a exactly as flattering as it sounds – we’re going to have all three phones linked down below honestly, I think our biggest surprise was the Note 5. Not in every way, mind you its gaming performance, wasn’t amazing, it’s 8 years old and doesn’t even support all the latest and greatest Graphics extensions, but for General phone chat browser use, it’s pretty darn, responsive about on par with the fairphone 5 to the untrained Observer, at Least, if you don’t turn the 90 HZ display on on the fairphone 5, though there are some reasons that we wouldn’t do that and we’ll talk about those later now. Of course, the fairphone did beat out the note in more of our controlled tests, but not by as much as you’d expect and against contemporary competition, the fair phone fars even worse. Not only did the pixel 8 outperform it in all, but one of our tests, the one test where it didn’t lose, was the time to fully charge the battery, and even then it was a tie also, once charged the pixel lasted twice as long before it was Fully discharged – Ah that’s why 90 HZ is off by default. This probably comes down to fairphone’s Unorthodox choice of s, so they went with the Qualcomm qcm 6490, which tldr is not a phone chip; rather it’s optimized for long-term Industrial and Commercial iot applications.
It’S a cool chip. It supports an impressive list of Wireless Technologies, including Wi-Fi 6E, with 8 by8 multi-user mimo, which is absolutely unheard of in a phone and crucially, it will enjoy long-term support from qualcom, enabling fairphone to continue to provide updates to this thing. For years to come, unfortunately, its cryo 670 cores are based on older armed designs that just can’t compete with modern chips, though, to be honest with you, the raw performance was far from my only issue with this thing. Remember that fingerprint sensor that I started out loving both it and the volume buttons are not actually proud enough to be easily found by touch, and I was constantly pressing one when I meant to press the other. The vibration is inexcusably weak compared to our Challengers, making it easy to miss a phone call when it’s sitting in my pocket and compounding this issue, while the maximum ringer volume of 87 DB is right on par with the comparison phones, the fairphone 5’s minimum ringer volume Is 71 DB that is about 15 DB higher than the competition which is perceived as almost three times as loud. That is really really loud, so my options were to either miss my calls by having it on vibrate or annoy the heck out of everyone around me. Now, admittedly, I can be a bit of a special case, at least that’s what my mom says, but guys I can’t be the only one who needs to know when someone is trying to get a hold of me, and this alone was enough to be a deal. Breaker, while we’re talking about special me, I’ve been daily driving, Samsung phones for a long time, and I have developed a bit of a preference for how Samsung does things which led to my next deal, breaker on the fair phone.
I cannot move the back button over to the right side. I’M sorry, but without that this lands squarely in the neat phones. That will never be my daily driver, pile making matters worse. I can’t even move the stock Google widget up and down without using a custom launcher really and guys.
I am just getting started on the skin. A long press doesn’t present an uninstall option for an app just app info. I missed call screening on this thing. A lot screenshot, editing and sharing sucks and Plex would just stop responding entirely very regularly, though, admittedly that could be Plex just being a steaming pile of garbage, and this is just a pet peeve of mine.
I couldn’t find any way to have it automatically proceed when the correct pin is entered. I gu get it pressing. Okay is a security feature, but I don’t like the extra keystrokes on top of all that I experienced a significant amount of just downright buggy Behavior, with the worst being audio problems. I think what was happening was that, even though the fairphone lost its headphone jack in the great Bluetooth War, it would sometimes experience Phantom headphone jack syndrome making it so that both the speaker and the earpiece would stay silent. It was really bizarre like on a phone call.
I could get it to work in speaker and then, if I was watching a YouTube video, I would get no audio at all. So the hardware is working. Fairphone told us. This was an issue that they saw in early devices, but then every time I experienced it, a reboot would clear it up, which indicates to me that it’s a software issue, let us know in the comments by the way, if you’ve run into this, with your fairphone 5 uh, let’s see what else uh.
Oh, the screen brightness bounced around, like my kids at a birthday party from our testing, it looks like pair phone, doesn’t do anything to smooth out the sensor data or the transitions between their brightness levels, and they also use a fairly small variable to store the ambient Brightness reading compared to other phones, the result is very distracting, especially when you’re watching content in a dimly lit room where the light from the phone’s own screen bouncing around the room and hitting the sensor will cause it to constantly change as it switches from one scene. To the next uh camera didn’t use it a ton when I did, the results were oversaturated oversharpened and generally overprocessed. I mean don’t get me wrong. It’S a lot better than my ancient note. 9.
As far as rear camera quality goes, but if you put it up against anything modern like the pixel or an s23 ultra there’s just no comparison. I also found that the dynamic range and auto exposure of the selfie camera, especially for shooting videos, was not amazing. It’S just it’s the kind of thing that tier ones spend a lot of time and money on, and I feel like we just kind of take for granted until we don’t have it to be clear. There were positives too, the running apps notification in the shade kind of nice.
Okay, I kid there there are, there are more of them. The repairability legitimately really cool and they’ve obviously put considerable effort into making things as straightforward as possible. If you need to replace a part, but if I’m being honest, I feel like they’ve, almost overshot the mark and they’ve made some unnecessary compromises compared to our humble Note, 5, for example other than the initial hassle of removing the back. It’S not actually that much harder to work on. I mean you need to give it a bit of a drink of isopropyl alcohol to release the adhesive on the battery. But after that, it’s a pretty easy swap you got the same ribbon cables, the same tiny screws, tiny plugs, they’re all the same size, but Samsung did it without turning their phone into a freaking weapon. For that, you had to wait for the Note 7 heyo ancient Zing Samsung. It kind of seems to me that by going the extra mile and turning everything into modules, fairphone has solved some problems, but they’ve also created some new ones, leaving them with a device.
That is, in their own words, a fair phone, not a great phone, and unless you desperately want to support their mission or your needs are extremely basic and you just like spending more money. I don’t know how to craft a recommendation for this thing I mean, maybe if they turned the S so RAM and storage into a module as well. So you could swap that out and upgrade it, but even then a part of me would feel so much better.
Just steering you toward rescuing an old Note, 5 from the shelter rather than adopting a brand new one of these and steering you toward our sponsor manscaped when the overgrowth is starting down in your undergarden cut it away with manscaped lawnmower 5.0, its trimmer blade and foil Blade are interchangeable, letting you choose between basic buzz, cut or pitbull smooth, not the dog breed. The guy who shouts Dolly the lawnmower 5.0 even comes with an LED light to navigate through those more voluminous spots. As you conduct your hunt for the Red October, it also charges conveniently with a USBC cable couple that with its portability and you can whack the weeds anywhere. You might be, though, please check any local statutes on public weed whacking beforehand. Check out the lawnmower 5.0 at manscape.com techtips and use code techtips for 20 % off and free shipping, if you guys enjoyed this video, the fairphone 5 isn’t available in North America.
Yet so hey, why not check out our review of the last Gen fairphone 4 .