fairphone

3 Articles

Escaping US Tech Giants Leads European YouTuber To Open Source

May 17, 2025 by 113 Comments

The video (embedded below) by [TechAltar] is titled “1 Month without US tech giants“, but it could have been titled “1 Month with Open Source Tools” — because, as it turns out, once you get out of the ecosystem set up by the US tech giants, you’re into the world of open source software (OSS) whether you want to be or not.

From a (German-made) Tuxedo laptop running their own Linux distro to a Fairphone with e/OS (which is French), an open version of Android, [TechAlter] is very keen to point out whenever Europeans are involved, which is how we learned that KDE has a physical headquarters, and that it’s in Berlin. Who knew?

He also gives his experiences with NextCloud (also German), can be used as an OSS alternative Google Workspaces that we’ve written about before, but then admits that he was the sole user on his instance. To which one must question: if you’re the sole user, why do you need a cloud-based collaborative environment? To try it out before getting collaborators involved, presumably.

Regardless what you think of the politics motivating this video, it’s great to see open source getting greater traction. While [TechAltar] was looking for European alternatives, part of the glory of open source is that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you can still contribute. (Unless you’re Russian.) Have you found yourself using more open source software (or hardware) of late? Do you think the current political climate could lead to a broadening of its reach? Is this the year of the linux desktop? Let us know what you think in the comments. Continue reading “Escaping US Tech Giants Leads European YouTuber To Open Source” →

Schematics, For A Modern Flagship Phone

February 7, 2024 by 36 Comments

The mobile phone is an expensive and often surprisingly fragile device, whose manufacturers are notorious for making them as difficult to repair as possible. Glued-together cases and unreplaceable batteries abound, and technical information is non-existent. But amongst all that there’s one manufacturer with a different approach — Fairphone. Case in point, they’ve released the full service guide including schematics for their flagship Fairphone 5.

Fairphone’s selling point is the repairability and internal accessibility of their products and of course they’ve made hay with this as a marketing opportunity. But aside from that, it’s a fascinating chance to look in-depth at a modern smartphone from the inside out. We see the next-level PCB layout and how everything is so neatly packed into the minimum space, all without resorting to a heat gun.

It’s great to have another hackable phone, and fair play to Fairphone for releasing all this stuff, but perhaps the most interesting part from where we’re sitting is how and where this phone is being sold. There have been hackable phones before, for many the Pinephone will spring to mind, but they have always been sold to an audience who buy to hack. Here in Europe where this is being written, the Fairphone is being sold as a consumer device. It won’t shake Apple or Samsung from their perches, but for a hackable device to be so generally available to those who wish to do things with it can never be a bad thing.

We took a quick look at Fairphone back in 2015, when they launched.

The Key To Modular Smartphones

October 30, 2015 by 48 Comments

Cellphone startup Fairphone is now taking pre-orders for their modular smartphone, which is expected to start shipping in December of this year. Although I’m much more familiar with Google’s project Ara, this is the first modular concept to make it to market. It does lead me to a few questions though: is this actually a modular smartphone, and how widely will modular concepts be adopted?

Continue reading “The Key To Modular Smartphones” →