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Could Fairness Become A Trending Topic In Smartphone Manufacturing? This Company Bets It Will

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Lovers of ethics and sustainability, rejoice: starting from today, you'll be able to pre-order the Fairphone 2, the second edition of the mobile phone largely made with materials coming from conflict-free areas and produced in factories where workers are treated and paid decently.

If labor conditions and the component's origins were the focus of the fist version, which sold roughly 60,000 units, this time the Amsterdam-based company put longevity and design at the center.

Unlike the Fairphone 1, this time the phone was built from scratch (the previous edition used a pre-existing design, licensed from a manufacturer): something that allowed engineers to extend its life-cycle with a configuration that allows easily replacement of broken elements, and also gave Fairphone's management wider control on whole supply chain.

On the other hand, this choice also put more responsibility on the shoulders of the producers: excuses are no longer an option when it's you the one who is in charge.

This bring us to another aspect which is often overlooked: making an "ethical" phone is actually much more difficult than you might think. First of all, you have to decide what's "ethical" and what's not.

These assumptions might change over time: if yesterday and today getting rid of conflict minerals, sold to finance civil wars, is one of the main issues, in a fast-changing world other priorities could soon come to the forefront. Consider, for instance, the phone as a tracking device. A "fair" phone could also be one that protects you from surveillance. Privacy by design could be the next big thing.

"Yes, I think this is an integral part of what we should be doing, not in the future, even now. We already try to look at the privacy aspects by possibly giving people the freedom to change their operating system, for example," Fairphone's CEO Bas van Abel tells me, "we are still working on both the technical and the legal aspects involved in making this possible."

"The big step we made from Fairphone 1 to this device is that we are aiming to provide open source communities from Jolla, Ubuntu, Firefox, the base codes to develop operating systems on this phone which allow more privacy or more security," he adds.

Fairness could also relate to the personal health of consumers, that's why the company is also designing the device keeping an eye on radiation levels.

Then there's the financial side: the company sustains itself with the sales of the smartphone (which ships for €525, Europe only for now, but they should launch in the U.S. in the first half of next year).

Since price is a factor, and Fairphone it's not a nonprofit, it could tempting to go for the best deal, the cheapest supplier. How do they stick to their moral goals while at the same time being able to make ends meet? What kind of role do financial considerations play?

"They do not always have the highest priority, I can tell you," the manager says, "I think we differ a bit with other companies on that aspect but you also have the responsibility to actually not do crazy deals. If one factory has a reasonable offer and is more expensive but has a lot more chance of actually being able to improve things in the factory and has better working conditions, we would definitely go for that."

The very idea of designing a phone that's more durable, and that everyone can repair on his own, goes against established commercial models, built on chasing the latest upgrade.

But this is possible because Fairphone's business is not based on how many phones they sell, the manager says, but on the social impact they have. They want, in a sense, to become a poster-child for a different approach to smartphones' production, and they believe that if their are successful, their path could be replicated by larger, more important corporations.

As it was done for the previous edition, the Fairphone 2 will be sold using a pre-order model to help the company maintain its independence and finance production, as well as invest in projects that influence a more responsible supply chain.

This time, the company aims to sell 15,000 phones by the end of September in order to source materials for the assembly of the first phones and to show suppliers there is a consumer demand for continuous production.

First backers who purchase a phone before the end of September will receive a limited edition phone.