Don't buy a FuriLabs FLX1s

I’ve said in a previous post that the FLX1s had good hardware, and that it was only the software that needed to mature. I have to update that to caution against buying an FLX1s because of hardware problems that no software update will fix.

So first, a quick update on software issues which continue to plague the FLX1s and which make it unreliable as a daily driver:

• Audio quality is terrible. The speaker phone is useless; I have never had a call where, if I was on speaker phone, the other person didn’t say they heard an echo which made the call impossible. This is a common issue reported by FLX1s owners.
• Answering calls seems to have gotten worse with updates. I will frequently answer calls and be unable to hear the other person.
• Calls are unreliable, and often fail in the middle. When this happens, I often get a “Modem is unavailable” message. I get this message a lot, in general, but it’s obviously worse when it interrupts a call in progress and prevents me from calling back for several minutes until the modem becomes available again.
• Occasional quirks have become more common with recent Phosh updates. The one that plagues me the most is that screen blanking goes into a loop where it blanks and unblanks serially; the only fix is to to either (a) remotely ssh into the phone and kill -9 phosh, which of course kills your session, logs you out, and loses the state of anything you were doing; or (b) reboot. Option A is not possible when I’m away from my computer, so long-holding the power button for 10 seconds until the phone reboots is the only recourse. This now happens almost daily.
• Memory management is terrible, and somehow seems to be getting worse. I get OOM killer rampages weekly, and if I’m not fast enough opening a shell and killing processes, the OOM killer eventually takes out my session.

However annoying these issues are, and despite the fact that nearly a year into owning the phone there’s still no fix for either of these, one could still hope for a software update that addresses them – neither sounds like a hardware issue.

The bigger issue is a hardware one, and it’s fundamentally a hardware design problem. FuriLabs decided to ship the FLX1s with two problems:

1. Calls can not be done over Bluetooth.
2. The phone has no wireless charging.

The first problem is huge, as driving laws (and common sense) in most places mean the FLX1s can not be used to take or make calls while driving. Bluetooth headsets can be used to listen to music, but that is all: you can’t use them to communicate. Aside from eliminating any chance of taking calls while driving, it also means you either have to hold the phone to your head while making a call, or plug in the USB headset that FuriLabs provides with the phone. As anyone who uses their phone for calls knows, there are times when holding a phone to your head is inconvenient: maybe it’s a long call, or you need to use your hands for something else. This means the headset gets a lot of use, and this means frequent plugging and unplugging of the headset. Because, even if you did want to leave the headset plugged in all the time, you can’t because of the second problem.

All flagship, and many non-flagship, modern phones have wireless charging. The FLX1s does not. If you’ve ever owned a non-wireless-charging phone, you know that this inevitably results in the #1 reason for USB-powered phone replacement: the USB-C connector in the phone breaks. In the FLX1s, this is greatly exacerbated by the inability of the phone to use Bluetooth for calls; it means that you will have to unplug the phone from the charger to take a call, either to hold the phone to your head, or to plug in the headset; and if you use the phone for any amount of calls, you’ll be plugging and unplugging the phone multiple times a day. This guarantees that before long the phone will need replacing or an invasive and expensive repair.

I got my FLX1s in Februrary 2026. For about half that time I had a 3rd party wireless charger permanently plugged into the phone under the protective case, and it worked pretty well. Eventually, I had to take it off because of the need to use the USB-C headset for calls. About a week ago, I started having trouble charging the phone: when plugged in, the phone wouldn’t connect to the charger unless I wiggled the cable around and found a position where it’d connect. In that time it’s degraded even further, and now I struggle to find a position where the phone will connect.

Anyone who’s had a USB-C connection on a phone recognizes this situation. Cable connections are the most fragile part of any mobile device, even beyond the screen. The decision to ship a device that not only can’t make Bluetooth calls but doesn’t have wireless charging guarantees customers will have to replace their phones much sooner than usual.

The USB-C port on my phone is failing; if this were any other modern phone, I could live with it; when the USB port on the FLX1s dies, the phone will become a brick because there’s no other way of charging it. I’ll be spending this morning looking for a replacement phone, and it won’t be a phone from FuriLabs. I’ll chalk this up to an expensive mistake and make sure the next phone is more well-designed.