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.

nowadays, there are quite some fair trade products customers can choose when buying stuff. there’s fair chocolate, fair bananas, fair t-shirts, etc. one common denominator of these products is that they consist of not too many things, that they are not too complex. essentially for all kind of products which are too complex – think of electronics – virtually no fair products exist. and in fact, producing a 100% fair electronic device is essentially impossible without a huge amount of ressources available. there are just too many different tasks to ensure.
but fortunately, there are some projects which at least try. most notably, there are two projects i want to write about today. first, there’s the german faire maus, a (somewhat) fair mouse. the precise list of pieces need to assemble one can be found here, together with information what problems can arise in their production, which problems are (essentially) solved for the fair mouse, and which are still unsolved. so, while not 100% fair, at least the process is very transparent and it is possible to identity points where the process is still not exactly fair.
another project is the fairphone, a project from the netherlands trying to produce a fairer smartphone. compared to a simple mouse, a smartphone is way more complex, and depends on a much larger range of different parts. well, as a consequence, it is also much harder to make it fair. the fairphone project still tries hard. besides fair, they also try to be very transparent about where everything is from and under which conditions it was obtained/created. for example, there’s conflict-free tin from a congolese mine involved.
the fairphone project is currently trying to get enough advance orders to produce the first batch of fairphones. they need 5000 orders, and so far, they just got around 1640. the number is increasing now and then, but i’m wondering if it will reach the required 5000 early enough. in september, the fairphone team wants to inform about a possible delivery date, which will hopefully be in october. so if you’re planning to get a (new) smartphone somewhen in the near future, you should think about supporting that project. the price of 325 euros is quite in range, and you’re supporting a good cause. (and if it doesn’t work out, you’ll get your money back somewhen in fall.)
actually, i just ordered one fairphone last week. (well, and also two fair mouses.) not that i suddenly like the idea of having a smartphone (i still don’t), but then, i can still install linux on it – after all, i will be allowed to do that, as opposed to most other smartphones which you don’t really own when buying them. (isn’t that another reason?)