A brand new phone

It is a little bit sad to say goodbye to a companion who have been good for you all along the Fairphone /e/OS journey. But not too sad because my old Fairphone 3 will be put to good use by a family member, just as one of them still uses my prehistoric, but still supported Fairphone 2.

Back in November 2019 I bought a new Fairphone 3, confident about the Fairphone hardware story but struggled with the operating system that came with the phone. I really wanted a phone not depending on and using Google services. During my search I came across a nice project called /e/OS and decided to take the gamble. Looking back it was a decision I do not regret. Although it was a little rough around the edges in some spots, I sticked to it.

Now 2.5 years later I found the phone lacking performance in few areas like the navigation and camera app, but those are not the real reason. My employer was so kind to allow me to chose the Fairphone 4 as a phone for work. So there it is.

Once unboxed the first thing to do was charge it to >50% battery capacity and proceed with the /e/OS install instructions for the FP4.

Due to an issue with USB connectivity through a docking station I had to switch to Windows for executing the adb and fastboot commands. Another thing I ran into was an outdated version of fastboot, so be sure you have recent adb and fastboot binaries.

<cut lines for readability>

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe flash core_nhlos_b core_nhlos.img
Sending 'core_nhlos_b' (108492 KB)                 OKAY [  0.279s]
Writing 'core_nhlos_b'                             OKAY [  0.232s]
Finished. Total time: 0.517s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe erase userdata
******** Did you mean to fastboot format this f2fs partition?
Erasing 'userdata'                                 OKAY [  0.649s]
Finished. Total time: 0.664s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe erase metadata
Erasing 'metadata'                                 OKAY [  0.031s]
Finished. Total time: 0.031s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe --set-active=a
Setting current slot to 'a'                        OKAY [  0.016s]
Finished. Total time: 0.016s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe flashing lock_critical
OKAY [  0.022s]
Finished. Total time: 0.022s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>c:\platform-tools\fastboot.exe flashing lock
OKAY [  0.016s]
Finished. Total time: 0.031s

D:\eOS\FP4\IMG-e-1.1-r-20220708202086-stable-FP4>

Once the installation was done I discovered there was only one physical SIM slot. I was not aware of this because the Fairphone 3 was equipped with two slots. As a solution I changed my personal SIM to eSIM which worked miraculously in one try.

Hope this one surpasses it's expected lifespan as well (compared to my FP2).