Understandably, given Fairphone’s focus on making a phone that’s sustainable rather than a portable powerhouse, the Fairphone 3’s specs aren’t competitive with other flagships we’ve seen this year. It’s got a 5.7-inch Full HD display, a 12-megapixel rear camera, and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. Internally the phone is built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, and features 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Its 3000 mAh battery might not be the biggest around, but it’s removable, allowing you to easily replace it if its capacity starts to degrade.
The entire phone is made form recycled, conflict-free, and fair trade materials, and is remarkably repairable. Sustainability and repairability from a small company comes with a price tag, however – but at €450, it’s actually not that bad.
Sounds like a nice device, but ..
does it have a head-phone jack?
Yes it does.
The idea is very good, I’d love a true modular smartphone that I can repair or mod myself. Anyway looking at the reviews the Fairphone 2 was a very unreliable device. I really hope they worked on that side.
From Thom:
From the article:
So Thom, how do you explain the difference between your “entire” and the articles ” attempts…where possible” ?
If you really want a phone that is good for the environment you get a dumbphone and you use it for 10 years.
The Fairphone 2013 stopped receiving spareparts in 2017. Meanwhile my mother is still using her 2013 Nokia 1520 after getting the screen and battery replaced after an accident just last year.
Fairphone is a great idea, but execution is sorely lacking
I still use my 2011 HTC Evo3D and only had to replace the speaker and the battery for now. It might not be the more “ethic” phone out there, but provided you date a reliable brand that would get enough audience, hence spare parts not necessarily from genuine source, you can the job done rather easily. Planned obsolescence is the worse thing, before ethic and shit.
What I don’t understand with the Fairphone 1 obsolescence is that like Project Ara, there was an idea to replace parts with updated specs with time, not just similar and outdated modules. So the base Fairphone could have been “upgraded” to Fairphone 3 specs over time. Working modules could have created a second hand market for people not taking the upgrade path.
There are several things that looks promising on the PR front, but while I understand things are not always easy, older products have better life span. Bought late 2017 a 2014 LG G3 for a third of the Fairphone price, working on a daily basis, provided it with a rugged case, battery replaceable, it’s going to make me happy for still quite a while.
Will see in the future what kind of a real game changer smartphone would make me buy a brand new phone and dump it the next year.