While Samsung filled a stage in London today with foldable phones and its first pair of smart glasses, a much smaller company on the other side of Europe dropped a quieter piece of news that might matter just as much to where your next phone comes from. Fairphone, the Amsterdam based maker of repairable, ethically sourced smartphones, has confirmed that two new products are on the way, and its CEO is not being shy about how big a deal he thinks they are.
What Fairphone’s CEO Actually Said
In an exclusive statement to TechRadar, Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck said the company is preparing to “really push the envelope on what people expect from modular and sustainable tech.” He did not name either product, confirm a launch window, or even hint at a category. That kind of restraint is unusual for a company that has built its entire identity on transparency, right down to publishing the cost breakdown of its own phones.
The vagueness is doing a lot of work here. Fairphone is not a company that teases products it cannot deliver, and a promise this specific about “pushing the envelope” suggests the team believes it has something genuinely new, not just an incremental refresh of an existing line.
Why This Is Probably Not Just Fairphone 7
The obvious guess would be a successor to the Fairphone 6, which only launched in June of last year. That timing argues against it. Fairphone has never rushed its handset cycle, the gap between the Fairphone 5 and 6 ran close to two years, and the company has said openly that it would rather owners hang onto a device for as long as possible than feel pressured into an annual upgrade. A phone announcement this soon would cut against everything Fairphone claims to stand for.
A more likely candidate is a refresh of Fairbuds, the company’s wireless earbuds that arrived in April 2024. Two years is a far more typical cadence for that product line, and a modular, repairable pair of true wireless earbuds would fit neatly under the “pushing the envelope” banner, especially since almost no earbuds on the market today are designed to be opened up and fixed.
The Fairtablet Theory
The idea generating the most chatter, though, is a Fairphone tablet, something TechRadar’s own headline only half jokingly dubbed a “Fairtablet.” Fairphone has never made one, and the category has an obvious gap waiting to be filled. Every major tablet maker, Apple, Samsung, Google, treats its slates as sealed, glued together devices with batteries that are miserable to replace and screens that are effectively disposable once cracked. A tablet built the Fairphone way, with a Torx screwdriver instead of a heat gun, would be a genuinely new argument in a product category that has barely changed its repair philosophy in a decade.
None of this is confirmed. But the fact that a company this cautious is willing to put its CEO’s name behind a public tease, without a product to point to, says something about how confident Fairphone is in what comes next.
Fairphone’s Track Record Actually Backs Up the Hype
It’s worth remembering that modular hardware has a long history of promising more than it delivers. Google’s Project Ara collapsed before it ever shipped, and Motorola’s Moto Z snap on accessories quietly disappeared within a couple of generations. Fairphone is the rare survivor of that era, and the Fairphone 6 shows why. It ships with semi modular accessories, a lanyard, a card holder, a loop grip, that screw directly onto the back of the phone, and the entire device can be stripped down to its individual components with nothing more than a single Torx T5 screwdriver. Buyers get an extended five year warranty, a commitment to eight years of software updates, and seven Android version upgrades, numbers that beat most flagship phones from companies many times Fairphone’s size.
That track record matters because it is the reason anyone takes a vague CEO tease seriously in the first place. Fairphone’s Chief Impact Officer has previously described the company’s goal as trying to “revolutionize the electronics industry from the inside out,” and van Eck himself has pushed back hard on the idea that sustainable tech has to mean expensive or underpowered tech, calling that trade off a myth that “neither is needed.” Two new products framed as pushing boundaries fit a pattern the company has actually followed before, rather than a marketing line invented for the occasion.
A Regulatory Wave Is Rising Right Behind It
The timing lines up with more than just Fairphone’s own product calendar. The EU’s Right to Repair Directive, formally Directive (EU) 2024/1799, takes effect on July 31, less than two weeks from now, and will force manufacturers across the bloc to offer repairs, spare parts, and repair manuals rather than quietly discouraging customers from fixing their own devices. Layered on top of that, the EU’s Batteries Regulation will require every smartphone sold in the EU to carry a genuinely user replaceable battery by February 2027, removable without specialist tools, with spare parts guaranteed for at least seven years after a model is discontinued.
Those rules exist because the current system is failing badly. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor found that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022 alone, with that figure on track to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030, and less than a quarter of it is properly collected and recycled today. Fairphone has spent over a decade building a business model around exactly the practices regulators are now making mandatory for everyone else. Two new products launching just as that legal pressure ramps up is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Fairphone’s Cautious Steps Into the US
There is also an American angle worth watching. Fairphone’s handsets remain unavailable outside Europe, but the company made its first real US move last November, selling its Fairbuds XL over ear headphones through Amazon. Van Eck has since confirmed a US phone launch is part of the company’s long term plan, while acknowledging on LinkedIn that entering the American market “is a complex and ongoing process,” largely because of import tariffs and the very different regulatory landscape compared to the EU. Whatever these two new products turn out to be, how Fairphone positions them for American buyers, if at all, will say a lot about how seriously the company is taking its US ambitions.
What to Watch For
Samsung’s Unpacked event will dominate headlines this week, and understandably so, given the redesigned Z Fold 8 lineup unveiled today. But Fairphone’s much quieter announcement points at a different question entirely: not how impressive a phone can be on day one, but how long it can stay useful, repairable, and worth keeping. With foldable prices already climbing across the industry, that question is only going to matter more, not less, in the years ahead. Fairphone has not said when we will learn what these two products actually are. Given the company’s history, the wait will probably be worth it.
