Sony Xperia 10 III experiences?

Devices
#10

I’ve been here since “The First One”.

Me neither; or maybe some earlier 4.x was about the same.
But i take that as more new and inexperienced users, and perhaps ever increasing standards SFOS is held against.
I.e. both these observations can be true - and i think they are.

This is true; but that has generally been when the user has broken their device.
The number of “oh, i had a patch active”, having installed something invasive, doing manual backups and not mentioning it etc etc is quite astonishing.

If it ain’t broken; don’t fix it.
There is no generic breakage from updating vs reflashing, and i don’t think there has been since the user name switch. Assuming there is some unspecified one is not productive to put it nicely.

No this is clearly visible on the forum.
I am however always on the latest phone and version - and that has been just fine historically. Not perfect, but just fine.

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#11

I concur with others: i’m super pleased with my 10iii, Android supports work well (with my 10ii i had to restart it every few days otherwise it was stuck), and it’s a lot smoother than my 10ii.

No OoM killer issues either.

Tethering now works on SIM1 with the latest CLAT implementation - even though i have to restart conman from time to time - but i can deal with it.

VoLTE also works well.

Only issue is the lack of support of 3 cameras - i liked the wide angle on my 10ii!

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#12

Oops typo, sorry Jolla Sailfish it is. :wink:

#13

If you don’t intend on buying a license I’ve been testing the gigaset GS5, which has a replaceable battery with 4.5.0.16/18 and it’s good. It’s a bit cheaper (about 230-270 depending on if it’s full or lite).

EDIT: I was really disappointed in the 10ii, which I only acquired as a test box (which it remains) so that I have a reference to what ‘official’ sailfish users experience. But if you’ve been using an FP2 (which I also had) you’d been happy with a GS5. For the savings, you can buy a spare battery :wink:

#14

I’m literally BEGGING Jolla to urgently do something with two things that badly affect my blood pressure:

  • lack of any tone when calling someone via VoLTE whose phone is also on 4G. Nothing at all, pure silence until either someone answers the call or the connection times out. If the called number is busy then all you get is disconnection after a few seconds and you don’t even know the reason because you don’t hear the busy tone or any message. If someone just doesn’t pick up (i.e. when you’d normally hear the “free” waiting tone), you can’t even know if the connection was established at all as all you “hear” is silence and you just wait and wait hearing nothing. It is a SFOS problem, because my SIM card put into my wife’s iPhone does normally get the usual tones on VoLTE connections, and my wife’s SIM card inserted into my 10 III with SFOS starts getting silence. And this is a VoLTE-only problem (and only if both sides are on 4G), because if either party is on 2G (or 3G) it doesn’t happen at all.

  • the fingerprint sensor. The way this thing works on the 10 III on SFOS is a mental harassment. How can it work 100/100 on the XA2 Ultra while on the 10 III it locks and becomes unresponsive literally every few touches? I have never seen such a fingerprint sensor behavior even of lowest-end Android phones of manufacturers whose names I can’t even spell.

I’d happily trade it for VoWiFi support, which is also badly missing, and with quite shitty 4G signal level where I live my wife’s iPhone really benefits from it.

If by “work” one means not doing anything, then yes. But if by “work” one means any active form of use, then I’d say it’s up to some 1.5 days. Which is OK, but twice worse than with Sony’s genuine Android onboard.

#15

The 4.5.0.18 update caused no significant issues for me - there are always problems - that’s what this forum is for, but aside from the issues below, I consider it perfectly usable. My perception is that SFOS is steadily improving which each release. Android support works well for what I have tried, and I notice no penalty in speed or power drain. Bluetooth connects to a couple of different cars OK.

I have both Android and SFOS X10iii so I can compare directly.

The X10iii has no 4G VoLTE support in my country on any of the 3 carriers. You can’t make the Android one work, nor the Sailfish one, so this is not a SF issue. This is probably Sony’s doing. This is not an issue if it works in your country, but if it doesn’t 4G voice may never work.

GPS is slow and poor if you are not outside under clear sky. This seems to be an inherent problem with the Sony AOSP. The XA2 had it worse, but I suspect all the Sony’s AOSP suffer from the same underlying issue. This may not matter to you. I need to use GPS in the forest, and it doesn’t work.

Standby power drain is worse than under Android, but the phone is probably good for 2-3 days.

#16

battery seems to be lasting 2 full days.
nice and responsive.
gps signal lock still seems pretty poor, though it does now work (unlike my xa2 plus).

#17

i think it’s a question of grip - how you hold the phone. it needs a very specific angle with my thumb, but it works 100% of the time.

of course i first need to press the button to wake up the screen, release the button, and then press it a bit less to have fingerprint recognised

#18

The non-perfect grip explains some of the failed readings, but not all. I can’t tell how often it happens (maybe once or twice a week for me?), but I have to restart the fingerprint sensor daemon every now and then to be able to unlock the 10 III without typing. The last time I did it was last night and the restart fixed the issue immediately.

Apparently it happens quite often, since there was a suggestion regarding Google assistant button and the fingerprint sensor daemon.

#19

No, it is not a question of grip or angle, because it is not the sensor not recognizing the fingerprint but not working at all (being temporarily kind of blocked or sleeping and not reacting at all). I place my finger on the sensor, it does nothing, I keep the finger on it without slightest movement, and it suddenly wakes up after 5 or 10 seconds and recognizes the fingerprint.

I have a LED notification enabled in mce ( mcetool --enable-led-pattern=PatternFingerprintAcquired ) to indicate when the sensor is active, so I always know if it is a problem of fingerprint not being recognized (in such case the LED blinks but the screen doesn’t unlock) or the sensor not being active at all (no LED). And it’s almost exclusively the latter. Moreover, I can sometimes see that the LED lights up even when there is no finger on the sensor (e.g. when I place the phone close to some object) which then kind of blocks it for some time, like 10-20 seconds. So it looks that sometimes the sensor gets triggered by other objects than finger, which kind of temporarily disables it.

I have an identical (at least when it comes to size and location) sensor in Android phones (e.g. my mother’s Motorola G52) and they work for me in 100% of cases. My 10 III is the ONLY device that permanently gives me problems in this regard.

Lastly, I also identified the fingerprint daemon to be sometimes causing power consumption issues due to high CPU usage. This can be seen e.g. in Crest application - sometimes the /vendor/bin/hw/android.hardware.biometrics.fingerprint@2.1-service.sony process starts utilizing a lot of CPU time - and this is most probably when it gets locked and doesn’t react to touches.

#20

That sounds interesting too.
Do you have some info on it’s battery life with SailfishOS and where i can find the port for the GS5?

#21

I got the same experience. I hsve to restart the fingerprint sensor several times a day and often see the fingerprint processes eating up the CPU.

It would be interesting if this issue could be solved with the Android 13 drivers, but this would need a new base from Jolla.

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#22

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-volla-22-gigaset-gs5-thread

My experience with the battery life is: with stuff like tooter (mastodon client) running all day, a charge a day. With more conservative use, 2 days. But the 4.5.0.18 release is fresh, so I’m still measuring. In general, I’m a fairly heavy user since I also develop on these phones, so my use is not the norm. @Pasik2 or @teracube may have some insights? I don’t think there are that many users yet :slight_smile: @playforvoices also has a GS5, I think?

#23

Interesting. My impression is that the GS5 has a shorter battery life than a X10iii, is that correct?
Battery life is the most important part for me, i want to get rid of daily charging :slight_smile: . 3-4 days is really the minimum acceptable given the fact that the battery will degrade during it’s life.

#24

Like I said, I’m not the norm. There’s a thread on battery consumption on the 10 III which gives me the impression it’s not better than the GS5, but I can’t compare them directly. https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/high-battery-drainage-xperia-10-iii

If I get a chance I can try to do a comparison for your ‘modest’ usage as you described at the outset. I had an FP2 and even with a new battery, I had to charge daily :slight_smile: Did you have WIFI off most of the time? How much media player usage?

#25

I found that topic and because it’s a bug report i assumed not everyone is affected.

My FP2 started it’s life in 2018 with 3-4 days on a full battery with mild use, until some some update degraded it to barely one day without any use. I’ve been in contact with the developer and we’ve done a lot of troubleshooting but never got it back to normal. Somehow it seems to be specific to me because others are not complaining :slight_smile: . I guess that’s the downside of community support.

In case you’d want to simulate my use-case:
My phone is mostly idle, 2 SIMs loaded and active. Data connection, wifi, bluetooth and GPS are all off (and only switched on when needed), in case it has a NFC or a fingerprint reader i’d switch that off too. Main usage is an occasional phone call or text message. I used to use the media player a lot for mp3’s (1-2 hours per day) back when the phone still did 3-4 days per charge, but even that use is almost gone now. I do use the calendar and it is important to me, and I sync manually because it only syncs to a server in my network.
I do some CLI work with openvpn and rsync to sync the calendar to my own server and rsync my mp3 collection to the phone, but that’s even less than monthly.

So basically, think about what most people would call low usage and take it even lower :slight_smile: .

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#26

At 18:00, the experiment began. I’ll protocol usage/state in edits to this reply.
EDIT: moved this to The Volla 22 (Gigaset GS5) Thread - #169 by teracube since it’s more appropriate there.

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#27

Thanks for your effort to help me @poetaster , i really appreciate it :+1:

#28

It’ll help all GS5 users if I do it tight. I’m on some minimal usage now :slight_smile:

#29

What about your battery just being a lemon?

To add to the actual topic, I just switched to the Xperia10III from the XA2 it’s nice and workinig well so far. No fingerprint or VoLTE issues, works fine even though I have multisim, which sometimes made issues on the iPhone with the other SIM. Battery is also good but the one from my XA2 is so down on capacity that my expectations are low.