Toying With the Idea of Fairphone

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There is an inalienable truth, that within two or three years all of my mobile phones require a battery swap. With an iPhone this costs 67.50 CHF for the SE but only 28 CHF for a fairphone. In light of this it makes sense to recycle the iPhone SE and replace it with a fairphone four, that is sold for the same amount but with a cheaper, easier to swap battery.

The issue is that when you slide from iOS to Android you need to migrate your apps, your accounts and your telegram, Signal, Whatsapp and other histories. In theory this should be easy as it may be backed up to Google Drive or a similar place. In reality if you slide from iOS to Android and back you lose your message history as you jump from platform to platform. That’s because, in the age of the cloud manufacturers want to lock us into their platforms.

Add to this the issue of Apple Car Play and the Android equivalent. My car requires that I use iOS if I want to preserve access to Car play and that is a nuisance. It’s not that I didn’t spend years using my phone for GPS navigation, but rather that with a central console it takes seconds to do something. With a phone you need to be stopped in a parking space or at a very long traffic light.

The key issue with the iPhone SE 2nd generation is that the battery was replaced but that the replacement battery is quite crap. The consequence of this is that the phone overheats, doesn’t charge properly, and sometimes lags, due to overheating.

To add to this is the chance that the iPhone SE will mushroom in size and price, due in part to the proprietary modem. I chose the SE precisely because it was cheap and convenient and if it becomes expensive and inconvenient because of size then it makes sense to swap to Fairphone for the key reason I mentioned above. Swapping batteries is easy, and costs 28 CHF.

Now we come to the fly in the ointment. The Fairphone 5 costs 500 CHF but should be supported for 5-7 years. The Fairphone 4 costs 200 less but will last until 2026, in theory, but might last longer. This negates part of the appeal of Fairphone. Having said this there is an open source OS that might be supported for longer.

In practice my mind is made up. I want to switch to a fairphone phone as my primary phone and an iPhone SE for in car navigation and instant messaging via Signal and Whatsapp. I usually wear out a phone battery within six months to a year so it makes sense for me to migrate my primary phone use to a phone with a battery I can swap on a whim, rather than by appointment.