Look I know the brax3 is not a flagship phone but I’m really close to putting it in the drawer and going through the drama of installing lineage or some other custom ROM on my 2 year old pixel.
So my bugbears.
Increasing amounts of crashes and restarts. Just now it froze and then buzzed for a minute before rebooting twice. I don’t have a lot installed on this and yes there could be some app causing instability but nothings been installed from anywhere but fdroid or arora. Nothing remotely odd only a dozen apps and half of those are browsers.
The keyboard sucks…or is it the screen or touch ability. Typing is often wrong, way more than it should be and is with me typing on any other phone. Scrolling the curser with the space bar in order to fix typos is frustrating as hell. Frequently the cursor is in a position and typing occurs a few letters away.
General jankiness to touch gestures….(I have no screen protector) its just imprecise. Apart from the pixel I’m used to cheap phones and they’ve never been this bad.
Look I hate google and meta spying as much as any of you and have none of that on my phone but so many of the replacement apps provide by Foss (not knocking free and open source generally) are so far from a good experience.
The camera is….well. Its sh1.t. unusable except for the most rudimentary of uses and the camera app is worse. But it has made me carry a real camera more so that’s a plus.
I travel a lot and attempt to use a phone outside. On a sunny day the brax3 screen is unreadable. Yes I know its a cheap phone but still this is bad.
So is it the hardware or the software? Is it all my fault somehow. ? Is there a remedy for my dissatisfaction?
First of all, if you are so disappointed why don’t you just return the device ?
Many devices have hardware problems and some bugs in the updates cause temporary problems.
If after a factory reset (which seems to fix the reboot problem) you keep getting reboots then you can replace the device.
Generally you can’t expect a degoogled device and especially Brax3 which is not a big corporation project to behave the same as a stock phone.
I haven’t noticed problems with the touch screen so it is either problematic or you have static electricity from something you wear or due to the environment.
The camera is very satisfying for any regular use, if you want top camera go to degoogled Pixel or some other brand notorious for its cameras.
FWIW I have not had any of these issues except no5 the camera is poorer than I would like on a phone but then again the price of the phone is so low I’m not going to raise a complaint or return the device the rest works just fine for me.
The keyboard action isn’t very good, must agree. I find that I need to frequently correct typos. I think this is more of an OS issue than hardware as the same thing happens to Samsung phones I installed Lineage on, which before worked well.
The camera is quite bad, it’s a software issue. Not a lot we can do unless someone steals Apple’s or Samsung’s camera app.
I do have an issue where updates stopped working but that’s about it.
Generally I find that everything runs on the phone well. I’m happy with it.
For the price and privacy, it is a reasonable compromise.
Worked like a charm, many thanks George. NB for anyone wondering how … 1) update the updater by running the apk 2) download the zip and in the updater choose three dots and ‘local update’
I liked the phone at first, but the more I used it, especially over the past few months, the more noticeable and annoying its shortcomings were revealed. The screen real-estate not fit to measure is a major disappointment, with 1/4” unused space along the bottom, and approx 1/8” along the top, in addition to the edge bleed. I have experienced screen freeze as well, or at least poor tap/text responsiveness. I don’t know if this is related, but reading text including emails is quite bad, with words broken up, rather than wrapping around onto the next line. This may be a result of the app being used, but such is doubtful. Yes the keyboard is subpar, but I believe there are options available to replace it.
The battery charging speed is very slow. I bought 2 phones and one I have still in the shrink wrap. Because of my current location sending them back is near impossible or otherwise prohibitively expensive, i.e. the loss incurred would not be worth the headache. I am considering sending them both back (supposing the used one at a loss), and purchase one of the later editions with the fast(er) charging and improved screen. However, I do not know if the screen measure/cut are more accurate, i.e. closer to full screen real-estate. Can anyone attest to the improvements made? Is it worth the wait, costs etc.?
In a few months I will be back in the US and Canada for a while, so I could take both phones with me to ship back. Undecided at this point. I do like the phone overall, and did not expect a flagship/near flagship level device. However, falling short on some of the design basics is akin to a manufacturing flaw.
I really like Rob and support the vision and mission statement of Brax tech, and own several products, but perhaps getting a higher-end phone (albeit more expensive) de-googled is a more suitable option.
Update to 7.2 for the freezing, reboots and similar issues. The rest you are describing are subjective preferences, for example I like that the LCD is protected by not reaching the edge and the aesthetics of the frame. I don’t even notice any touch screen issues. If it’s true for you it may be a defective touch panel but it would happen on only one device.
The text wrapping concerns solely the app and maybe the Android API, my mail app shows various artifacts from version to version, they come and go.
Thanks for your input/suggestions. I’ll just see how it goes with my current phone, and likely I will set up the second Brax3 for a friend, and gift it to him as I intended, when I travel in May. All of the things I mentioned in my comments/concerns occurred while using 7.2
I may set up the second Brax3 with Ubuntu Touch, but would prefer (as would the recipient) that it be out of beta-testing before I pass it along.
7.2 doesn’t seem to have problems, it may be your device, charging is done at 2 Amperes for this batch, the new version has fast charging and better screen, brighter and some other improvements, check the second phone so that you can know and replace the defective phone, the Heliboard keyboard doesn’t have good prediction but you can test other keyboards too
I will look into those options, and perhaps exchange (at whatever price differential) 1 or both phones for the later versions, as my purchases were pre-manufacture, and first launch/batch. Thanks again.
