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

Fairphone is exclusive on this planet of smartphones. It is just about the one firm attempting to construct a sustainable gadget that is not glued collectively and hostile to the restore group. Right this moment, Fairphone is saying a brand-new flagship: the Fairphone 4, which brings an up to date design and higher specs whereas nonetheless transport with all of the modularity you’ll anticipate.

The bottom specs for the 579 euros ($671) mannequin embody a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G SoC, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. There’s additionally a 649 euro ($753) model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. On the entrance, you may get a 6.3-inch, 2340×1080 LCD with slimmer bezels (in comparison with the Fairphone 3 design) and a teardrop notch for the 25 MP entrance digicam. The 3905 mAh battery is Qualcomm Fast Cost 4.1 appropriate, so if in case you have a appropriate USB-C charger (not included within the field), you may take the battery from 0-50 p.c in half-hour. The telephone ships with Android 11 and has a facet fingerprint reader within the energy button, a MicroSD slot, and the choice for twin SIM utilization through the one bodily nanoSIM and an eSIM.

Surprisingly, there is not a headphone jack, which looks like one thing Fairphone’s demographic would actually have needed. Wired headphones final indefinitely, whereas Bluetooth buds flip into rubbish after just a few years when the batteries die. It appears antithetical to Fairphone’s sustainability pitch to inform individuals to expire and purchase Bluetooth headphones.

On the again you may discover a 48 MP primary digicam with OIS and a 48 MP wide-angle digicam with a macro function. The third circle on the again is not a digicam; as an alternative, it homes a laser autofocus system, coloration sensor, and a time-of-flight sensor.

The important thing Fairphone function is the modular parts, which make repairs straightforward with only a screwdriver. Contained in the telephone, you may discover eight simply replaceable components: the show, the USB-C port, selfie digicam, ear speaker, primary digicam array, loudspeaker, battery, and the rubberized again. In case you break something, all of those components shall be accessible on the market on Fairphone.com. The one “noncommercial spare half” is the core module, which options the SoC, storage, RAM, gadget body, and fingerprint reader.

Fairphone is striving for longevity this 12 months, and the simple repairability of this mannequin permits for an unbelievable five-year guarantee at no additional value. The corporate can also be promising “long-term availability of spare components”—components for the Fairphone 2, a tool that launched in 2015, are nonetheless on the market on the web site.

It is not simply {hardware} the place Fairphone is blazing a path of sustainability. The corporate has additionally been placing a herculean effort into software program updates, like when it up to date the 5-year-old Fairphone 2 to Android 9.0 this March. Fairphone did this with out Qualcomm’s assist, which has lengthy deserted the chips it created 5 years in the past. Updating an Android gadget with out chipset-vendor assist is unprecedented, however Fairphone nonetheless spent the cash and partnered with the LineageOS group to make it occur.

Fairphone says it needs to proceed the industry-leading replace work it has been doing with the Fairphone 4, however an absence of assist from mainly everybody else within the {industry} means the long run is unpredictable. So Fairphone is guaranteeing updates till the top of 2025, when Qualcomm’s assist runs out, after which capturing for extra.

Here is the complete assertion:

For Fairphone 4, software program assist is assured till the top of 2025 and contains upgrades to Android 12 and Android 13, however the firm goals to increase it even additional, till the top of 2027, with upgrades to Android 14 and Android 15 regardless of assist from the chipset provider expiring. With this unparalleled ambition, Fairphone is aiming to repeat what it succeeded in doing with a earlier mannequin: six years of software program assist from the launch of an Android gadget.

The Fairphone 4 is up for preorder at the moment and ships October 25. Will probably be broadly accessible throughout Europe and the UK, and that is solely Europe and UK, by the best way. These of us within the US nonetheless cannot have good issues. What is going to it take, Fairphone? There are individuals within the US who need to assist this.

Itemizing picture by Fairphone