A New Kind of Smartphone
The smartphone is the computing device for the next century. There’s nowhere you can go on Earth where someone doesn’t have a smartphone. As with any popular technology, there are positive and negative consequences: landfills will be lithium mines in the future, and phones are constantly listening in on conversations you’re having right now. What if we could design a phone that’s good for you and the environment?
Enter the Fairphone
Fairphone released their latest piece of hardware this week, a phone that respects your freedom and the freedom of others.
Unlike nearly every other phone on the planet, the Fairphone 3 is as sustainably sourced, at least as much as it can be. The gold in the phone is Fairtrade certified and comes from conflict-free sources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But a phone that respects freedom also means you can repair it. Here’s where the Fairphone really shines. In an iFixit teardown, the Fairphone 2 scored an incredible 10/10 repairability score. This is a phone designed to be taken apart. The components are modular, similar to the now-cancelled Google’s Project Ara.
A Phone That’s Free As In Speech
There are phones that can be repaired, and then there are phones that are free as in speech. This is is the challenge Purism is taking up. They’re trying to build a phone that you can take apart, study, or build yourself. It’s Open Source hardware, but a phone.
The challenges for the Purism phone are to engineer a way around thousands of patents, two manufacturers (Mediatek and Qualcomm) that control most of the radio market, and the inability to source radio modules. They’re doing this by decoupling the CPU from the radio with an NXP i.MX8M quad-core and Vivante GPU, with radio cards hanging off an M.2 slot. This is modularity, and a great way to engineer a system that can be open.
But open hardware is just one part of an Open Source phone. There’s also firmware and software. You won’t get that with an iPhone, and you won’t be using Google Play with that either. That’s why Purism built PureOS, a phone that’s not based on Android or iOS.
PureOS is built on Debian, and you can actually run it on a Raspberry Pi. However, unlike a Raspberry Pi, there are no binary blobs or other proprietary code shuffled into the software stack. You can actually read the code of everything in PureOS.
CTO of Purism Nicole Faerber recently took to the stage at Chaos Communication Camp to talk about the challenges of manufacturing a phone. Component lead times are more than 20 weeks, there are hundreds of regulations and certifications, and the language barrier of manufacturing in China is too much to bear.
The Challenges Of Making Everything Open
It’s hard to create a piece of hardware that’s completely open. Most of the SoCs found in smartphones are running bits of code hidden in a ROM somewhere, and you can’t get documentation on most radio modules. Simply making an Open Source OS has its challenges, too, and many failures litter the landscape.
In 2013, Mozilla released Firefox OS and shipped five million phones running this operating system. It didn’t go well. The Firefox phone was killed after just two years.
Canonical, parent company of Ubuntu, tried to ship an Open Source phone with a crowdfunding campaign. Seeking $32 Million, the campaign raised less than half that. Canonical called it quits.
While there is a market for an Open Source phone, it remains to be seen whether or not the market is large enough to support the manufacture, distribution, and support of such a device. This isn’t an inexpensive endeavor, either; when you’re building a phone from scratch and using conflict-free minerals, things simply cost more.
The story of Open phones that respect freedom remains to be written, but there are significant challenges, and no one has quite cracked the nut of making a product that people want while still adhering to the requirement of the Open Source community. We can only hope that Purism or the Fairphone will tap into these markets and build a popular phone that can be used by everyone.
