Tag: fairphone

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Today I finally made the switch to my new Fairphone 4 (from my previous Samsung S9, which I’ve been using for 3 years). I had pre-ordered it in September, received it early December. It has been lying around my home office and been in use as an alarm clock for the past three months, without me actually switching over.

Finally however I switched over the SIM card and SD memory card today.
I dreaded the migration (as I don’t simply sync everything on my Android Phone with Google, there’s a lot of manual migration involved), and didn’t feel like I’d have the mental bandwidth available to do so in an organised fashion.

In the coming days I will have to switch over apps (all installed already), such as the various authenticators, banking apps, cloud, mail and calendar, as I come across them. I will also need to re-add phone contacts, as I go along. I never store them on an SD card, or with Google, only on the device itself. It’s work whenever you switch phones, but it also means I don’t carry around years old contact details of people I no longer interact with.

I initiated the Flickr auto-upload from the new device (old images are all on the switched over SD card), have access to my company’s Rocket.chat instance, and added E’s phone number as first steps. With this phone I should be all set until 2027, as Fairphone guaruantees the device and software updates for at minimum 5 years.


A first random shot with the Fairphone, to try out its camera and test the correct settings for auto-upload to Flickr.

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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.