Fairphone

The last time I bought a new phone was two years ago. My old One Plus 3 that I had gotten three years prior was becoming finicky, slow, was showing a lot of visible wear around the edges of the glass and finally the power button had broken. I ran out of batteries while taking photos with and was only able to turn it back on by powering on into debug screen by plugging it into my PC while holding down the power button and once I got it on I couldn’t unlock the screen without plugging it in or out of something.

After a little bit of looking around I settled on getting an Fairphone 4. It’s pricer than other phones with similar specs but I do not care about having a top of the line phone and the company who makes it is trying to be less evil than other companies, using recycled, fairtrade materials and such and the phone itself has swappable parts if things get damaged and they promise security updates for longer than most other companies do.

They’re certainly not perfect. I know the Graphene OS developers are not impressed by Fairphone’s security policies and spare parts for different Fairphone models are not compatible with each other; I cannot upgrade my Fairphone 4 with parts for a Fairphone 5. But they do still keep selling replacement parts for older models after newer ones are released. They still sell parts for the Fairphone 2 which was released in 2015 so hopefully I can keep this phone going for a long time even if I drop it one too many times and have to repair it. I am quite clumsy.

In fact in the time I have had this phone I have already dropped it many times, including once into the toilet. It seemed fine at first after this but after a little while the screen stopped responding to touch. I had thankfully left bluetooth on and I had with me my fold out bluetooth keyboard and mouse with me and I was able to connect them and use them to shut down the phone to try to prevent any permanent damage.

When I got home I was able to disassemble the phone with a Phillips #00 screwdriver. I wiped down the parts and left them to dry fully and when I put everything back together the screen was working fine and has been working ever since. A lot of other phones would probably have been more waterproof and able to survive a quick dunk better but being able to disassemble it and dry all the parts thoroughly made me at least feel a lot better about the chances of getting the screen to work again. Thankfully it did, but even if I hadn’t I would have been able to get a new screen and swap it in myself rather than having to pay a specialist to fix it or replace the phone entirely.