Content warning: Light blue rear of a smart phone with 3 camera lenses shown, and a front facing view with the word Fairphone on the screen Fairphone is not trying to compete on bleeding edge specifications. It can be more likened to a mid-range phone, with long support,
Fairphone is not trying to compete on bleeding edge specifications. It can be more likened to a mid-range phone, with long support, ethically sourced components, and easily repairable (screwed not glued) modules. For example, you could swap out the main 50MP camera for $75.50 (if that can be upgraded say after a few years, that would be really great!).
It has all the essentials though like Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, sub-6 GHz 5G support, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, dual 50-megapixel cameras, a 90Hz OLED display, a side fingerprint reader, and a normal-sounding modem, DSP, ISP, and AI engine.
The IP55 rating for dust and water resistance does not worry me too much, as I’ve never had need of more than this in over two decades of carrying mobile phones. I have, though, had major pains trying to replace the glued in battery of my Nexus 6P phone. I do anyway fully insure my phone against all-risks.
What is really interesting though, and we’ve heard this before from Fairphone, is that modern consumer phone OS support is often limited by Qualcomm (or other SoC vendor), as Qualcomm must continually adapt Android updates to work with their chips. Fairphone has got partly around this limitation by employing an industrial grade Qualcomm chip instead of the usual consumer version, which has shorter support by Qualcomm.
Although the camera is not going to be as good as my Galaxy S23 Ultra, I’d be quite interested to see if my banking apps would work with this phone. The reason is my banking apps (well one of them at least) has very stringent security requirements which I remember excluded the use of my rooted Pixel 2 XL phone (even the Magisk cloaking could not hide the root status from the banking app). I think the bank also mandates the use of its official app from the Google Play Store too (and this is used for photo verification as well as website 2FA logins for me). The Fairphone does come with its own Fairphone OS, but it does seem you can get that with, or without, the Google Apps. If you can get by without the Google Apps, then this won’t be any problem, but if you have to have the official app from the app store then you may want to be sure this will all work fine.
