Technology

I have a Fairphone 5 and it's... ok. It's definitely overpriced for its specs but you can't really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It's also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that's why I switched), it's a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I'll pull it out of my pocket and it's mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn't appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I've had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn't allow you to open the keyboard again. It's also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that's probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.

The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don't expect the polish you'll get out of a Samsung flagship, you'll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don't regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn't really worth the money.