Logbook entry #2 - My kingdom for a phone!

And so I was in a train station, just having returned to my home city after a visit to a friend. While thinking back to a Saturday well spent, my mind wandered a bit too much and my phone fell from my hands. This proved to be the final straw for my trusty workhorse.

Having served me for more than 6 years, my old phone was now dead. Well, mostly dead that is: it's screen had cracked (even through the screen protector) and roughly 20% of its pixels had died. It could still turn on, receive calls and play videos but I decided I had reasonably used the phone to its full extent and was now the time to treat myself.

As with all my purchases (and especially the tech and fashion ones) I want to buy European. Not only I trust European developers to a certain level of craftsmanship and design but I also want to invest in our shared economy. After all, this money is inevitably going to return back to me and my family and friends.

Naturally, my first thought was the flagship European phone manufacturer - Nokia. We all had a Nokia phone at one point of our life and those phones are known to be quite sturdy which is a very good trait for a phone for me it seems! I thus entered the Nokia website, but was ultimately perplexed. All sorts of technological services advertised and no products section. This was a high tech company, not a phone designer!

I definitely could still search for a Nokia phone through other channels, but being somewhat old fashioned I wanted to buy straight from the source, so I kept on looking. I soon bumped to Fairphone, the sustainable and ethical dutch phone brand!

The phone was all I was asking for. The website claims that the supply chain, from mining to manufacturing is as fair as possible (typical dutch directness and honesty in play here). The phone was also made with a modular design, ensuring that if anything breaks you can just change the affected part. Adding to this package was a reassuring 5 year guarantee. The catch was of course the hefty price tag, which amounts to €828 including all accessories.

And so dear readers, your fellow author suddenly starts feeling ~ €1k lighter. At least I got a shiny new phone to boot! And I have the pleasure of knowing that I contributed to a good cause.

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