What are people’s experiences with the fairphone (4) in regards to build quality?
Apologies, rant ahead of my frustrations with it
I bought mine second hand and had to replace the battery immediately (maybe previous owner treated it badly)
The mic stopped working recently, which I kind of fixed by taking it apart, cleaning it out and putting it all back together but it’s still dodgey
Charger port no longer works without me jamming the charger in and holding it there
Also again from the start the actual horsepower behind it seems insufficient to run the version of android it came with smoothly sometimes, meaning at some point soon I’m going to have to replace it just so it can keep up.
It’s great that I can fix these problems by getting replacement parts rather than replacing the whole phone, but it’s getting expensive really quickly and I’m not sure I trust their build quality given how much has broken right off the bat
Charger port not working without jamming the charger in just sounds like pocket-lint to me. Has happened once every year or two with almost every phone I’ve ever owned. Grab a really thin needle, turn the phone off, unplug the battery, and GENTLY scrape the border of the USB-C port out. It’ll probably fix the charging port issue. Always has for me.
I worked at a Samsung mobile phone repair center and this was reason number one phones did not charge. The gross stuff that can come out of a customers phone…boh.
I’ve always felt like people were overblowing the pocket lint thing, since I’ve never had it happen to me. Just realized that it’s because my pockets are too small, so the only pocket I can use is my back pocket with the port sticking out.
I’d suggest using a plastic flosser so it’s not conductive, but this definitely breathed new life into my phone. It turns out battery lasts longer if it’s charging more consistently.