Fairphone - Technical details, links and Q&A interaction with Fairphone [26 Jul 2014]

I finally got around to do more extensive power measurements (video with more detailed info to follow).

Everything is done with the display (when on) on lowest brightness, I have not looked into the effect of brightness on the consumption, hopefully next week. Also: the measuring equipment is self-built, so don't bet your money on my findings. The current was measured in 10 ms steps, then send through a rolling average. In theory anything could happen in between the 10 ms, and the consumption pattern suggests very short bursts of current. In brackets the time to live, if the battery delivers exactly 2000mAh

Display off, nothing to do in the background: basically below our precision, somewhere at 2mA (1000h), but I mean nothing to do
Display on, nothing to do: 85 mA (23.5h)
Video playback: ~160mA (12.5h)
Incoming call 3G (with MP3 ringtone, vibrator, the works): > 410 mA (<4.8h), sorry, the measurement equipment clipped at 430mA
Talking on 3G: 230 mA (8.7h)
Incoming call 2G: (MP3, vibrator): >370 mA (5.4h), again, clipping involved, but clearly less than 3G
Talking on 2G: 140 mA (14.3h)

With Z-Device-Test I tried other components as well, one interesting thing was that the flashlight apparently can only be switched on when the main camera module is active as well. BTW: the changing of the advertisement on the bottom of Z-Device Test costs ~30mA.

Main camera on (with picture in the display): 235mA (8.5h)
Front camera on (with picture in the display): 195mA (10.2h)
Vibrator: ~60 mA
Flashlight: ~50 mA

GPS costs next to nothing, when trying different applications, GPS on or off seemingly made a difference of ~10mA, all power measurements here mainly showed costs for drawing pictures. Bluetooth similar, as long as the component is only on, but no pairing or other activity happens, next to nothing.

Heise wrote in their short test that in their measurements they assumed 7.1 hours of video playback, which would result to 281 mA. But at least with XVID and MP4 I could not make the Fairphone take more then 180 mA peak. No idea what the reason for that is, but as they explained, they emptied the battery to half it's capacity, but who knows how they deemed this "half". And our equipment surely is not off by 100 mA.

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I agree with you the speaker is too loud by default.

Here is the way to configure it without installing apps.

1) Enter Mediateck EngineerMode by calling *#*#3646633#*#* /!\ you can mess up your conf, be carefull not to randomly click on every button
2) Swipe to the right to Hardware Testing
3) Enter submenu Audio
4) Select LoudSpeaker Mode
5) in Type list, change Ring with Media

*Here i try to explain (with my poor english, and my poor explaining skills) how to adjust the sounds setting that best fits you, skip to 6) for a no brain guide*

This is the place of the sound settings for musics, movies and apps.

On the page you have a field Level which enables you to pick levels from 0 to 6
and a field Value where you can put a number.

Levels corresponds to a fillness of the sound bar, so with default configuration, almost empty sound barre correspond to the level 0 and to the lowest sound of your phone.

If you want to change the sound volume for the almost empty sound bar, select Level 0 and change number in the field value (lower number => lower sound)

If you want to change the sound volume for bar filled at 1/6th change the value for Level 1 etc

The value I putted there were:

6)
a)Select Level 0 and put 80 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
b)Select Level 1 and put 110 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
c)Select Level 2 and put 130 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
d)Select Level 3 and put 150 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
e)Select Level 4 and put 170 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
f)Select Level 5 and put 200 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.
g)Select Level 6 and put 240 in Value field then press the Set button on the Value field line.

7) Test your sound, if it fits you, go to 8, else read the text you skipped after 5
8) Restart (might not be necessary but, who knows ), or if you don't restart makes sur to close the EngineerMode so you won't mess up with your conf by accident.

That seemed to work whithout breaking anythings with my phone, and hopefully it will with yours

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Gesture typing aka swipe is not available on your Fairphone keyboard? No problem!
As we figured out, the Google Keyboard from Google Play is not compatible with the Fairphone. But you can install the apk directly from the thread [APK] Official Google Keyboard.

After the download, follow following instruction:
1. Go to Settings -> Security -> activate Unknown sources
2. Scroll down the notification drawer and tap on the icon of the downloaded Google Keyboard apk
3. Go to Settings -> Language & input -> activate the Google Keyboard.
Done

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The Xposed framework is known for its very good customization abilities.
One of the famous modules is GravityBox. With it we were able to solve some issues.

Volume slider interrupts system
Sometimes changing the volume interrupts the system, because the volume slider won't disappear. The system is inoperable. Switching display on/off can help as well as a system reboot. Use the extended volume sliders from GravityBox.

Unused SIM slot notification
If you have only inserted one SIM, you get an icon in the status bar. You can hide this notification with GravityBox.


How to install GravityBox
First you have to download and install Xposed. In this app you can download GravityBox.

First: Download the Xposed Installer APK and install it
Launch the Xposed Installer, go to the "Framework" section and click on "Install/Update"
Reboot
Done!

Second: Download and install GravityBox, therefore open Xposed, go to download section and select GravityBox.
After that, enable the module by checking the checkbox in the modules section
Reboot
Done!

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I saw that XPrivacy can fake the serial number for the apps you select (and you can even select that ONLY the serial is faked by Xprivacy, and ONLY for one app, so it has no side effects. And you can input your real serial number into XPrivacy if you want!).

With the correct serial number faked by Xprivacy, my favourite navigation app does now work fine.

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The bootloader is open.
I downloaded, modified an uploaded the boot.img and the phone did still boot, so it doesn't verify any signature of the boot image.

Hint: boot-image starts at /dev/bootimg
/dev/bootimg seems to point to a start address of internal memory but you can access the whole memory through it. So if you write something into, you can brick your whole phone and delete everything - probably.
The boot image is probably at most 0x600000 bytes large, afterwards recovery partition starts.

Command to retrieve the boot img:

dd if=/dev/boot of=/sdcard/boot.img bs=6291456 count=1

Tools to modifiy:

https://github.com/bgcngm/mtk-tools

After repacking, the boot.img will be smaller (verify!).
Then you can copy with dd if=/sdcard/boot1.img of=/dev/boot.img - on your own risk, better wait till official firmware image becomes available.

DON'T use cat on /dev/bootimg! Use dd.
Don't write more than 6291456 bytes or your recovery will be lost.
May be good Idea to backup recovery with
dd if=/dev/recovery of=/sdcard/recovery.img bs=6291456 count=1
If using mtk-tools - use a unix filesystem to extract into so that executed-rights within the initramfs of the boot-img don't get lost.

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0. (install terminal emulator)
EDIT: as imparted by Nicholas Evans in the Fairphone support forum, BusyBox is not necessary for this as the used programs are provided by Android itself.
1. get superuser rights (Start terminal emulator, type "su" and press enter, grant root priveledges if asked for)
2. remount your system-partition with write access (type "mount -o rw,remount /system" and enter)
3. change the permissions for the following files to rw-r-r:
/etc/permissions/com.google.android.maps.xml
/system/etc/permissions/com.google.android.maps.xml
/system/framework/com.google.android.maps.jar
(to do so, type "chmod 644 $file" and enter, replace $file with the filename and path as written above, do this for all three files)
4. remount system-partition read only (type "mount -o ro,remount /system" and enter)
5. close terminalemulator, delete appdata and updates for Google playstore and reboot. For me that was all.

Please have these instructions rewied by an experienced user/developer before using them, I will/can not guarantee for anything

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