Ever since the beginnings of the Fairphone project I’ve been meaning to get one. I know its founder Bas van Abel from when Fairphone was a research project at the Amsterdam FabLab / Waag Society where he worked, some years before it became a company. But the timing was usually off, such that when my existing phone needed replacement there wasn’t a Fairphone available, or I didn’t want to lay out the cash for the purchase and opted for the spread out payments to a mobile service provider. On occasion I spotted one in the wild.

It seemed to go that way again when I started searching for a new phone after the summer. My current Samsung S9 is a little over 3 years old, and is now moving beyond its support horizon: no more Android version updates since a year, and monthly Android security patches have just ended to be replaced with quarterly ones for at most another year. Exploring the current market I checked out Fairphone and saw that they had no phones in stock. So I more or less resigned myself to another round of Samsung or somesuch.

Then today my feedreader surfaced an article announcing the launch of Fairphone 4, with pre-orders opening now for delivery in November. It comes with Android 11 and guaranteed 4 but planned 6 years of software support, and a 5 year warranty. Its modular design allows replacing or upgrading various components. At 536 Euro excluding VAT it comes in about 20% cheaper than the Samsung S21 I’d likely have opted for otherwise.

Delivery should be the first half of November, looking forward to it.