Fairphone 4 has an incredible 5 year warranty, aims for 6 years of updates

Fairphone is unique in the world of smartphones. It’s pretty much the only company trying to build a durable device that’s not sticky and hostile to the repair community. Today, Fairphone is announcing a brand new flagship: the Fairphone 4, which brings an updated design and better specs while providing all the modularity you expect.

Base specs for the € 579 ($ 671) model include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G SoC, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. There’s also a $ 649 ($ 753) version with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Up front, you’ll get a 6.3-inch 2340 × 1080 LCD screen with thinner bezels (compared to the Fairphone 3 design) and a drop-shaped notch for the 25 MP front camera. The 3905mAh battery is Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.1 compatible, so if you have a compatible USB-C charger (not included in the box), you can boost the battery from 0 to 50% in 30 minutes. The phone comes with Android 11 and has a side fingerprint reader in the power button, a MicroSD slot, and the ability to use a dual SIM card through a physical nanoSIM and eSIM.

Surprisingly, there’s no headphone jack, which seems like something the Fairphone demographics would have really wanted. Wired headphones last indefinitely, while Bluetooth headphones turn to garbage after a few years when the batteries die. It seems contrary to Fairphone’s sustainability talk to tell people to go out and buy Bluetooth headphones.

On the back you’ll find a 48 MP main camera with OIS and a 48 MP wide-angle camera with macro function. The third circle on the back is not a camera; instead, it houses a laser autofocus system, color sensor, and time-of-flight sensor.

The key feature of the Fairphone is its modular components, which make it easy to repair with just a screwdriver. Inside the phone you’ll find eight easily replaceable parts: the screen, USB-C port, selfie camera, speaker, main camera array, speaker, battery, and rubberized back. . If you break anything, all of these parts will be available for sale on Fairphone.com. The only “non-commercial spare” is the main module, which includes the SoC, storage, RAM, device bezel, and fingerprint reader.

Fairphone is aiming for longevity this year, and this model’s ease of repair allows for an incredible five-year warranty at no additional cost. The company is also promising “long-term availability of spare parts” – parts for the Fairphone 2, a device launched in 2015, are still on sale on the website.

It’s not just the hardware where Fairphone leads the way in sustainability. The company has also put Herculean efforts into software updates, like when it updated the 5-year-old Fairphone 2 to Android 9.0 in March. Fairphone did this without Help from Qualcomm, which has long abandoned the chips it created five years ago. Updating an Android device without chipset vendor support is unprecedented, but Fairphone still spent the money and partnered with the LineageOS community to make it happen.

Fairphone says it wants to continue the cutting edge update work it does with the Fairphone 4, but a lack of support from virtually everyone in the industry means the future is unpredictable. So Fairphone is to guarantee updates until the end of 2025, when Qualcomm’s support runs out, then pull for more.

Here is the full statement:

For Fairphone 4, software support is guaranteed until the end of 2025 and includes upgrades to Android 12 and Android 13, but the company aims to extend it even further, until the end of 2027, with upgrades. to Android 14 and Android 15 despite chipset vendor support expiring. With this unprecedented ambition, Fairphone intends to repeat what it managed to do with a previous model: six years of software support since the launch of an Android device.

The Fairphone 4 is up for preorder today and ships October 25. It will be widely available in Europe and UK, and it is alone Europe and the UK, for that matter. Those of us in the United States still can’t have nice things. What will it take, Fairphone? There are people in the United States who want to support this.

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