Fairphone 4 Impressions

Two days ago I got a Fairphone 4 because the battery on my iPhone SE is still not lasting for a long time and because it’s laggy when I open certain apps. For both of these reasons I was tempted to wait until 2025 for the new iPhone SE to come out. When I read that it would have a bigger screen and cost more the niche reasons for getting the new SE vanished and it freed me to consider the Fairphone 4.

What differentiates the Fairphone 4 from other phones is that you can replace the battery with ease. With other phones it’s better to take it to a shop where they have specialist experience and knowledge to replace the battery. With the Fairphone 4 it’s back to an old habit, for many of us. You remove the back cover, swap the battery, replace the back cover and turn it on. It takes a few seconds.

It seems paradoxical to me, that I need to get a Fairphone 4, in order to be able to swap a battery with ease. There was a time when being able to replace batteries was quick and easy. Having said this there is a minor issue. Fairphone 4 batteries are relatively cheap but if you buy a spare the best way to charge it is to have it in the phone. It’s for this reason that I will wait six months to a year before getting a spare.

A nice feature of this phone is that you can use the SD card to add more memory. In my case I added a one terabyte card. I don’t need that much storage but I was curious to see if it would work. It did. I don’t plan to remove that card yet.

So far the phone feels quick and responsive when I use it and it feels like a good phone. The screen is large and it feels heavy compared to an iPhone SE, but not compared to large screen phones like we are used to.

Although we can replace the screen, battery, speakers, USB-C adaptor and more I do not expect to need to. It is not as weatherproof as other phones so I have to avoid using it in the rain.

I am hesitating about moving Signal and Whatsapp to this phone because I don’t want to lose the message history and groups from either apps. I find this to be frustrating, that we can’t slide between phones as easily as in the past. On a related note I will still need to use an iOS phone for Apple Car play if I want to use the on board screen. The solution is simple. We can simply use a phone holder like we did in the past.

And Finally, I was tempted by a third generation iPhone SE and a Pixel 7a as they were in the same price range but the iPhone SE will be replaced next year so it’s not worth getting now, and the Pixel7A would defeat my entire reason for changing my phone. I wanted a phone with a battery I could swap.