• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Fairphone adds a 5G smartphone, touting software support until at least 2025

September 30, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone has announced its first 5G smartphone, the Fairphone 4.

The ‘greentech’ mobile maker differentiates from almost the entire smartphone industry through a promise of sustainability via repairable modularity.

It combines this with a big push around socially responsibility and ethical electronics — touting fairly sourced materials and better conditions for workers (through a living wage program) across a supply chain that spans the dirty business of mining rare earth minerals and all the other components used in making mobile devices, as well as the handset manufacture itself.

The Fairphone 4 comes with a five year warranty and a guarantee of software support until the end of 2025 — including upgrades to at least Android 12 and 13. (It runs Android 11 out of the box.)

The startup also hopes to be able to extend the phone’s lifespan even further — saying its goal is software support until 2027 and upgrades to Android 14 and 15 too.

The new flagship follows the launch of the Fairphone 3+ last year — which enabled owners of its prior top-of-the-range handset to upgrade to for as little as €70 just by swapping out a few modules.

Fairphone’s new flagship, the 3+, costs just €70 as a modular upgrade

Prioritizing reuse to reduce e-waste is a key goal for Fairphone — so even though it’s announcing another new phone this year it is taking steps to avoid being accused of creating more e-waste by generating demand for new hardware.

The Fairphone 4 is the first it’s made that’s being billed as “electronic waste neutral” — as it says it will “compensate” users’ phones and spare parts by “responsibly recycling one phone (or an equal amount of small electronic waste) for every Fairphone 4 sold”. Or else take back and refurbish at least one other phone to prevent the production of a new one.

In another development towards its ambitious goal of making truly sustainable and ethical personal electronics, Fairphones notes that it’s been able to expand its list of fairly obtained materials, adding six new ones. In the Fairphone 4 these include Fairtrade-certified gold, aluminium from Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI) Performance Standard certified vendors, fair tungsten from Rwanda, recycled tin, rare earth minerals and plastics.

Consumers have long been holding onto smartphones for considerably longer than upgrade cycles of the early years of the market as the space has matured and device refreshes have become increasingly iterative.

Simultaneously environmental concerns are also stepping up driving changes in how consumers buy and use mobile devices. So the new shiny thing, in consumer demand terms, might actually be keeping the old shiny thing for as long as possible and responsibly recycling it when it finally comes to the end of its run.

In Europe, lawmakers are also considering right to repair legislation.

Fairphone’s modular design, which allows the user to easily swap out and replace components (like the screen, battery and camera) if a part of the device breaks or malfunctions, may provide a glimpse of the future of consumer electronics — if regulators go down the path of mandating repairability in order to tackle e-waste and incentivize reduced consumption as part of measures to decarbonize the economy and respond to the climate crisis.

Image credits: Fairphone

Commenting on the launch of the Fairphone 4 in a statement, Eva Gouwens, CEO of Fairphone, said: “We want to challenge the traditional way of designing devices, including the notion that thinner is better. The starting point in development was to produce a premium sustainable smartphone that is future-proof, easily repairable, designed to last and therefore more circular and fair.”

The tech specs of Fairphone’s latest device have also had a boost vs the previous flagship — so as well as 5G the phone comes with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G chipset, beefed up rear & front cameras and a 6.3in display, among other tweaks.

The handset will be available for pre-order from today via Fairphone’s website and through selected partners, with RRP at €579 (for 6GB RAM/128GB) or €649 (8GB RAM/256GB).

The two variants will be released in Europe on October 25 through Fairphone’s network of regional distributors.

Available colors for the handset are grey for the 6GB device; and grey, green and green speckled (exclusively through Fairphone’s website) for the 8GB handset. 

Can Fairphone 3 scale ethical consumer electronics?

Source Link Fairphone adds a 5G smartphone, touting software support until at least 2025

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Over 80% of oil output in Gulf of Mexico still offline a week after Ida
  2. Dollar drifting as traders turn to central bankers
  3. Algeria’s former President Bouteflika dies at 84
  4. Cricket-IPL resumes in UAE after COVID-19 disruption

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version