Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Fairphone 1

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Units shipped
  
60,000

Type
  
smartphone

Successor
  
Fairphone 2

Form factor
  
slate

Fairphone 1

Compatible networks
  
GSM 850 900 1800 1900 WCDMA 900 2100

First released
  
December 2013; 3 years ago (2013-12)

The Fairphone 1 is a touchscreen-based, slate-sized smartphone designed and manufactured by Fairphone. It was released running Android 4.2.2, with the Fairphone OS skin. It was the first phone from the social enterprise Fairphone, announce on 14 May 2013 and shipped beginning in December 2013.

Contents

2013: first production batch

  • The project raised money for the initial batch of phones through pre-orders, reaching the required 5,000 on 5 June 2013. It sold the entire initial production run of 25,000 handsets on 13 November 2013, nearly a month in advance of the revised mid-December release date.

    • 2014: second production batch

  • A second production run of 35,000 phones was released for sale on 21 May 2014.
  • 3D Hubs and Fairphone partnered in July 2014 to offer locally produced 3D printed cases.
  • The last batch of devices of the second production run was sold in February 2015. No more Fairphone 1 were produced, with the company focusing on developing the phone's successor Fairphone 2.

    • Alternative OSes

    In November 2013, one of the developers of Replicant wrote a blog post in which they said that Replicant could work on the Fairphone and the bootloaders (that are not part of the operating system) may even be free software. The Fairphone team seemed "definitely interested" in helping get Replicant running on the device.

    In August 2014, an unofficial build of CyanogenMod 11 (Android 4.4 KitKat) for the Fairphone 1 engineered by Christian Hoffmann was published at the XDA Developers Forum. [1]

    OS Updates

    in December 2014, Fairphone admitted that it had failed to convince chipset vendor MediaTek to open up the source code for first-generation Fairphones. In September 2015, Fairphone released an update indicating that they had indeed gained access to MediaTek's source code.

    An update to Kitkat (Android 4.4) is announced for 2016.

    References

    Fairphone 1 Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA