A Month with the Fairphone 4 (phone review)

★★★½☆ Back in November 2024, we bought a Fairphone 4 as a hedge against the tariffs and trade wars that seemed likely to commence the following year, figuring they’d drive up prices just in time for one of our phones to kick the bucket. The idea of a phone that’s built as sustainably as possible, is user-repairable, and guarantees support for a minimum of 5 years was appealing. I would have preferred the Fairphone 5, but their only US retail partner, Murena, never sold that model here (though they have since picked up the Fairphone 6 and 6+). From what I could tell the FP4 was comparable to the phones we had, and there was that longer support period. And I was able to confirm that it would work on T-Mobile’s network. The teenager used it for a while before we bought something more like what he wanted, and earlier this month I pressed it into service replacing my dying Pixel 5. Murena ships their phones with /e/OS, an Android fork that provides replacements for some of the non-Free…