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
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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
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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