two weeks ago, i received my first smartphone ever: the fairphone. (which now makes me one of two fairphone owners i personally know of.) unpacking it was quite an experience, as the fairphone team paid a lot of attention to small details:
while unpacking i was accompanied by some of the cats, though they didn’t seem to have any interest in the phone itself:
well, the phone’s protective film told me to open it up, and so i did. after all, i own that phone. everything important is labelled:
exchaning the battery or adding up to two sim cards is easily possible. after re-inserting the battery and turning the phone on, i was greeted with a nice introductionary video. (video playback works fine, apparently.) the main home screen greets me with a large button to “enjoy some peace”, a nice mode disabling all network capabilities for an interval which can be set, allowing you to get away from emails, phone calls and other messages. there aren’t too many apps installed; in particular, all google apps (play store, maps, …) are missing, but can be installed by clicking a button. well, i thought about it for some time, but then decided against it, at least for now. there’s no need to start spilling my data around the world…
one of the first things i enabled, though, was the phone encryption – something like a hard disk encryption, i guess. by password. obviously, since typing in passwords on a phone is quite painful in the beginning, the password is not optimal yet, but that will change as soon as my typing capabilities got better :) (let’s see if they use something like luks, which would allow me to just type in a new password, or whether the whole thing has to be re-encrypted…)
anyway, since smartphones are quite low-security products, i’m not sure yet for what exactly i will use it after all… but it definitely won’t get full access to my server and other computers’ data, which probably should include email as well.
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