introduction

My old Phone was going down hill quickly. Not even because of the battery not lasting long or a cracked screen, that was both fine, but because of software. I had already used the phone for about 1 year without any updates, since Samsungs cheaper phones don’t give that many years of support. Sure I was a bit concerned, but just didn’t put any important information on it and isolated it on my networks, for a bit more security. At the end it stopped being able to install or uninstall some apps. Those were both apps installed through the Google Play store and the F-Droid store. So I needed a new phone. Yes I really neeeded it, since I need an app for the ticket I use to travel with public transport. So I looked around. I wanted something with solid software support, since I don’t need a lot of performance. Normally I just listen to music and text a bit. Since I already knew Fairphone it was not a hard choice. I would have considered SHIFT, if they didn’t just sell on preorder, which I don’t do. So it was Fairphone then, the most fair producers of tech I know of, that are not a Uni project or experiment ¹. This was quite a happy choice, if it wasn’t for the one hardware flaw: a missing headphone jack! But there are no real good alternatives.

The hardware

What do the best intentions if the result is bad? So let us take a look, at what Fairphone build.

The phone

I will not repeat the specs of the phone here, you can look them up on Fairphone’s webpage ². But I want to still highlight a few notable changes they made over last generation. Firstly they upgraded the display greatly, to an OLED display with up to 120 Hz refreshrate. They added modular backsites, which don’t interest me much, but they might be something for you accessory people out there. And finally they added a small slider above the powerbutton, which can be customised to do different things. Later on in the software section I will talk a little more about this.
What I instantly liked was the feel, sure it is a bit bulkier and heavier than other phones, but the backside is nice to hold and the aluminium rails give an assurance of durability. I needed to adjust to having the volume buttons on the opposite site of the power button, coming from a device that had them below and also a bit for the slightly bigger size, but otherwise it felt good.
The SIM and SD Card slot on the bottom of the phone are also easily accessible with one of these metal poke tools. Although I really liked the concept of having them beneath the backpanel on the older models, since you don’t change them that often. Maybe that would have given enough space for the missing headphone jack. This is one of my biggest pain points with this phone. Wired headphones are much more sustainable then wireless ones, just because of the battery and extra electronics alone. It would just have been nice to use them with this phone without the use of a dongle. A friend ended up gifting me an adapter by SHIFT ³, ironically competitors of Fairphone. And I am really happy with that.
Battery life. This is quite nice actually, since the phone lasts for 2-3 days for me. This is with a few hours of screen on time and light usage in browser, listening to music and podcasts as well as texting some people with Signal, Fluffychat or WhatsApp.

Modularity

I took it apart. Just to see how easy it was. Really nothing can be said against it in this degree. Sure would it be cool to go back to the times where they had just very well designed modular cirtuit-boards meant for users to service? Yes, for me personally it would, but for most people probably not. This phone could be repaired by people who have no knowledge of technology or at least quite little. That is very good for accessibility.
Also it is obvious how much thought has been put into the design. There is a sligh groove at the bottom of the phone on the back, which helps to slide away the bottom part of the phones back site on disassembly and the guides on their website help a lot. Also there are not a gazillion different screws with the need for different screwdriver bits, which is quite nice.

Short introduction to Fairbuds

At the point I bought the phone there was a deal to get free Fairbuds with the phone. Since the Phone doesn’t have an headphone jack, I decided to at least give them a try. I knew it was quite possible they wouldn’t fit me, since I never before have used in-ear headphones that didn’t hurt my ears or just fall out. Still, I put them in the order.
Their fit isn’t the worst I have ever had, but still my ears hurt after about 10-15 minutes of usage. But still I want to put some other impressions here.

Firstly I had big trouble trying to connect them to my phone. They wouldn’t go into pairing mode for some reason. After a factory reset the issue fixed itself.
Then I found the touch areas to be quite sensitive, which made me toggle ANC accidentally all the time. And speaking of ANC, I can’t really say I am happy with it, but never really used ANC before. It has a quite annoying hiss sound, which makes me not want to have it on. Also the transparency mode is sounding really weird. I have read that this is a problem with many headphones of this kind, but it is still trippy to me, so not recommended.

Sound. This is difficult to evaluate, since I don’t have good testing equipment, but only my ears. This means these are just subjective impressions.
They sound fine for the size, probably worse than some other in ears in that price range, but they are repairable and in comparison really fairly produced (Since Fairphone admits to having still a way to go, I will not call them full fair here.). Their repairability seems to make both the charging case and the buds themselves a bit bigger, but I didn’t really mind.
Back to the sound, since I said it was fine, I want to explain a bit more. They sound like small headphones, they have not a big soundstage, and don’t represent sound accurately at all. They also lack a bit of treble, which I was able to fix to a degree with the EQ in the App. All in all, most over ears will sound much much better, but for people who just want to listen to some music, they are okay.
As I already said above, I ended up getting an adapter from USB-C to 3.5mm, so I don’t use these anymore.

The software experience

I bought the phone with the stock OS, since I didn’t know how much I would like /E/OS ⁴ and 50€ ⁵ are quite a lot for me as a student. I tried out the stock OS a bit, but then decided to flash a custom ROM.
Fairphone allows to flash custom ROMS fairly easily. For unlocking the bootloader you will need to get the serial number and get an unlock code from their website, and you are good to go, then just turn on OEM unlocking and reboot ⁶! Really nice and easy. Then I tried /E/OS at first, but did not stick to it, the reason why will be explained later on. But I decided to then install Iodé ⁷, another open source ROM based on LineageOS ⁸. And I stuck to it.

Stock OS

The stock operating system is quite bare. It is pretty much the default Android experience with Google services and a few extras. There is an app to track how long you have your phone, a custom camera app and a few system additions, like their focus mode, that can be triggered through the slider. This focus mode is neet, but nothing big. I remapped the slider to turn do-not-disturb on and off, which is much more useful to me, not having much of a social media habbit.
Otherwise it wasn’t really spectacular. Not to much to say about it really.
A few things though, that a friend who also got a Fairphone noted to me. There is no good Tasks application, with a nice widget that also shows a due date. I referred them to an app from the F-Droid store ⁹. And there is also no lock screen customisation of the clock. This is something they noticed due to a friend of us having a Google Pixel phone, which has this feature. And not to get me wrong here, technically Android 16 has the customisation feature, but the clock faces are a Pixel thing. They must be added by each manufacturer. But a technically really doesn’t help bring new watch faces to your phone.

/E/OS

/E/OS is based on LineageOS, as I noted already, but it changes quite a lot. Firstly it adds Micro G ¹⁰ for support of more applications, but also a lot of things very specific to /E/OS. Before I go over the system changes, let me address the apps that Murena (Company behind /E/OS) ¹¹ adds. Basically they add everything that Google has, like a Calendar, Mail, Cloud storage, but with their own services integrated into everything. They try to fully replace the Google ecosystem with their own, which personally I really dislike. Sure, it is convenient, but convenient is not necessarily good. It locks you in and also can have security impacts. But let me not go into too much detail here. Rather let me talk about the customisation they did to the Android UI.
Maybe you know of chinese manufacturers mimicking Apples iOS UI a lot. That is the case too with /E/OS. This was quite suprising to me, since I never saw a note about this kind of customisation. Since this takes away quite a lot of features, like the App-Drawer and being able to freely arrange icons on the home screen I couldn’t stick with it. What was even more infuriating to me, who likes well rounded products, was that some parts of the UI were styled and others were left as is or were mildly touched, like the settings. Depending on the settings page the UI could look drastically different, making the experience horribly inconsistent.

But there is something cool with /E/OS, if you are fine with a bad clone of iOS: The focus mode of the stock OS can also be used in /E/OS, since Murena and Fairphone have worked together on it. This is quite cool. But not enough to keep me using it.

Also a note on downloading the image to be flashed: It took me a day to download, since the download speed is not a lot and the download was interrupted almost 20 times and needed to be restarted. I started at like 10 O’Clock and was finished at about 20 O’Clock. This is horrible!

Iodé

Firstly, the download was much much faster. It saturated my internet connection, so I assume it can go up more than 350 MBit/s, which already was plenty fast. The install instructions are clear and the installation script worked well and I was done in no time.

Instantly I felt more at home. In the initial setup I was prompted to select what apps to preinstall, which honestly should just be a default in Android. Then there is the selection of apps to preinstall, all open source and well selected. And there are a few apps from Iodé itself, adding a little more features to the experience, one of them being a DNS filter. I don’t personally find them useful, but they don’t hurt.
Otherwise it is just Android 16 with F-Droid and the Aurora Store preinstalled. Everything “just worked” for me. And I have been using it for about one month now. Honestly I am really happy with it.

Iodé lacks the custom functions of the slider though, it can just be mapped for toggling different notification levels, which for me personally is enough, but if you like the custom thing Fairphone created, probably a bummer. It would be really cool, if Fairphone just opened up that, so other ROMs could add it.

Final thoughs

The hardware of the Fairphone is great and its support for custom ROMs is highly appriciated. Since it so well supported by custom ROMs too, it is just a very pleasant experience to use. The custom slider is very nice and useful to me for turning on or off do-not-disturb. Also I really like the display. Sure it is not the best you can get, but in comparison to my 5-6 year old phone it is great! Sure, that is not a completely well rounded comparison, but many who would switch to a Fairphone will likely use their phones for that long, so they will have a similar experience.
Further I really love the long battery lifetime. It is just good to know you don’t have to charge it every day. So I just charge it occasionally and usually I never run out of battery, if I am not testing an app like Briar, which just draws power all the time.
Modularity and repairability are also nice, although for me the primary factor was the fairness, since I would be able to open up most Google Phones as well and would like to have tried Graphene OS. But Google is not really a fair company and also based in the US. Further they seem to not care about “Don’t be evil” anymore, which is kinda scary when a wanna be dictator is president.