Fairphone is probablythecompany most associated with repairable and environmentally friendly phones, no matter how much Apple and Google want to tell you theirlatest and greatest smartphonesare green. The new Fairphone 5 is more than just a repairable phone, though. For the first time, the company’s latest smartphone looks like a product that fits the year it was released in, with a modern design and display combining a device that can be easily fully disassembled.
The Fairphone 5 certainlymanages to turn eyes with its first impressions, but how does it hold up over a longer period of time? I set out to find out just that when preparing to write my full review, so read on to learn if this eco-focused phone is really as good as we all hope it is.
Fairphone 5
The Fairphone 5 is the phone to choose if you value repairability and environmental responsibility above everything, but it may not be easy to come by in the US. It’s possible that the company will launch it soon, though, maybe in the form of a cooperation with Murena, like it did with the Fairphone 4.
Availability, network, and pricing
The Fairphone 5 is only available in Europe for now, available on the company’s own website and a few other retailers. You can buy it for €700 or £650, which is roughly $750. That is more expensive than phones with comparable specs, but you’re also buying a much longer support window, fairly sourced raw materials, and a repairable handset that introduces some unique design challenges.
It’s possible that the Fairphone 5 will make the jump to the US in the future, though.In a collaboration with Murena, the Google-free Android ROM, the Fairphone 4 came to the US market just a few months ago, complete with the usual replacement parts. While it may take Fairphone a while, it’s certainly possible that it will bring its new phone to the US sooner than later now that the infrastructure is in place. We can only hope that the company will offer customers the choice if they want to go Google-free or not — the Fairphone 4 is currently only offered without Google apps.
Design and display
The Fairphone 5 looks a lot like its predecessor, the Fairphone 4. That’s not a bad thing. It shows that Fairphone has found a unique and recognizable design language that works and that makes it instantly recognizable. The Fairphone 5 retains the signature triangular camera setup in the top left of its removable plastic back, the same slightly rounded aluminum frame, and a more sizable bezel than what you would usually see in today’s smartphones. The visible design is not the whole story, though.
The Fairphone 5 offers some significant industrial design improvements. While the Fairphone 4 clearly had some design compromises attached to make it repairable, the Fairphone 5 is only slightly bigger, heavier, and bulkier than other 2023 phones. If you’d put an assortment of budget and flagship phones from this year next to each other, you’d have a hard time picking out the Fairphone 5 as something that absolutely doesn’t fit. That in itself is a big achievement and makes me hopeful about future innovation in this space. If Fairphone, a small upstart company, can build a repairable smartphone that doesn’t look like it’s compromised, what’s stopping Apple and Google? (Profits, probably.)
The Fairphone 5’s biggest upgrade is its new OLED display, which, combined with the new hole-punch selfie camera, sets a couple of firsts for the company. It gets plenty bright, runs at a speedy 90Hz refresh rate, is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, and at 1224x2770, is as sharp as you’d hope for.
I also appreciate the perfectly even bezels at the top and bottom. They may be bigger than what we see on other modern phones, but the fact that they’re even makes them, at the very least, aesthetically pleasing. From the looks of it, the screen is laminated to the glass — this is a compromise when it comes to repairability, as you’re able to’t replace broken glass when the screen itself is still fine. Thankfully, you’ll find it a much more immersive viewing experience because of its lamination.
Hardware and what’s in the box
The rest of the hardware fits right in with the OLED display: The Fairphone 5 offers the specifications of an upper midrange phone. It comes with a 4,200mAh battery that charges at 30W, 256GB of microSD-expandable storage onboard, 8GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm QCM6490 processor. The latter is an outlier in the phone world — don’t be surprised if it’s the first you’re hearing of it. Its a chipset usually applied to industrial or smart home applications, but it offers the big advantage of a longer support window that allows Fairphone to offer up to eight years of software support. It’s pretty much equivalent to the Snapdragon 782G in all but name.
What truly makes the Fairphone special is the fact that you can fully disassemble it yourself in a matter of minutes, using a standard screwdriver you likely have at home already. Once you pry off the back and remove the hand-removable battery (which you will have to take out whenever you want to access the SIM card or the microSD card, just like in the good old days), you can easily disassemble the phone and replace whatever modules need replacing.
Despite the removable back, Fairphone still managed to get an IP55 water and dust resistance certification — something you don’t usually see in electronics you can take apart yourself. IP55 means that it offers basic protection from water and dust, but it’s not rated to be immersed in water. Try not to drop it in a puddle.
In the box, you’ll find nothing but the Fairphone 5, along with some warranty information and a quick start guide. Apart from the phone, all contents and the box itself are made exclusively from cardboard. you may use the box to ship in your old phone to have Fairphone recycle it, but that’s about everything you can get out of it.
Fairphone argues that you likely have a lot of the necessary accessories like a charger and a cable already lying around, and it doesn’t want to create more e-waste than necessary. If you do need a new cable and charger, the company offers some of their own that you can add to the cart while shopping. Otherwise, there areplenty of great chargersandhigh-quality USB-C cableswe recommend, too.
Software and performance
The Fairphone 5’s software comes very close to what Google offers on its Pixel phones, minus the company’s specific enhancements like Call Screen, always-on song recognition, and more. It’s basically stock Android with only a handful of extra tweaks, which should make it easy to feel right at home with it.
Fairphone entirely relies on Google apps to provide the default software experience, with all the usual suspects like Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Messages, and more on board — no needless duplicates anywhere. The one app that Fairphone itself pre-installs is the My Fairphone app, which offers a quick start guide, information on the company’s extended 5-year warranty, device information, and quick access to help. Something that surprised me, though, was that I found three of my German carrier’s apps pre-installed, too, which might be some form of cooperation with Fairphone. It’s a bummer that they can’t be uninstalled at all, at least while my SIM card is in it.
Speaking of the SIM card: Fairphone still insists on displaying your carrier’s name in the top left corner by default, taking away precious space that could be used for useful notifications. Thankfully, this can be easily and quickly disabled under system settings →Display → Network name.
The setup process, including activating Fairphone’s 5-year warranty, is simple
I’m also not a big fan of the launcher. It has the Google search bar hard-coded at the top of the first home screen, which puts it in an awkward and hard-to-reach position. If you prefer a less dense app grid, you only have the option to switch from the default 5x5 grid to a 4x4 and a 3x3 option, but no 4x5 option.
This makes icons appear comically far apart from each other, and takes away one more row of apps that could easily fit the screen. I also wish the launcher would auto open the keyboard when opening the app drawer, like Pixel phones optionally offer. It’s mostly serviceable other than these points, though, and I’m sure these are all points that might not bother many people at all.
Fairphone promises to support the Fairphone 5 for up to eight years, with a potential extension to ten years in the cards. In that time frame, the company wants to provide five OS updates. On top of that, it makes it simple to install a different OS on the phone, like the aforementioned privacy-centric Murena — some units are even sold with it pre-installed. If history is any indicator, it may take Fairphone quite some time to port new Android releases to the Fairphone 5 the older it gets, though the industry-focused processor with its long-term support may help alleviate those problems.
When it comes to performance, the midrange Snapdragon equivalent does a fine job for anything I throw at it today, be it extensive maps navigation, some light gaming, video streaming, and more. It barely ever stutters or has to take a break to think, and that’s promising for its long-term viability. However, the Fairphone 5 is supposed to last more than eight years. While the processor is good today, I’m not sure if it was a good idea to opt for a midrange processor rather than a high-end one, if only to have that extra performance overhead for the years to come. Think about it — the first Pixel phone arrived just seven years ago, and I’m sure it’s not nearly as usable today as it was in 2016.
At the same time, it’s clear that Fairphone learned its lessons about processors. When Ireviewed the Fairphone 3, it already exhibited severe performance problems right from its release. I don’t know if there was more optimization done to it to help it last longer, but there is only so much you’re able to do to keep phone running well with underpowered hardware. For what it’s worth, I saw multiple people at IFA still using the Fairphone 3 this year, including a Fairphone PR representative who, I would assume, could have access to a newer Fairphone if they wanted to, and they seemed happy enough with it.
If you’re not pushing the boundaries of what mobile computing offers, I’m confident that the Fairphone 5 should last you for a long time, especially considering that Fairphone 3 experience in mind that I had at IFA. I still wish it had a flagship processor, though, just for that extra peace of mind. There is a reason why Apple keeps pushing the processor boundaries on its phones, something that allows it to sell brand-new older phones like the iPhone 13 with little to no performance issues two years after their initial release.
Battery life and charging
The 4,200mAh battery is also a wonderful throwback to past times. If you don’t like carryinga good old power bankto top up your phone, you can consider simply getting a replacement battery early that you can throw in your bag for backup. This might be necessary in the longer run, since the 4,200mAh capacity it has is on the lower end of the modern spectrum.
I used the Fairphone while covering IFA 2023 and when I was traveling on vacation, so I put it through its paces more than I normally would, but I felt that I had to recharge it more often than other phones, particularly compared to some Xiaomi and Honor phones out there.
Given that Fairphone’s Android version is barely changed compared to stock Android — without the optimizations certain brands place on battery life that can result in missed notifications — this isn’t a perfectly negative downside. Here, apps run reliably and as expected in the background with timely notifications, something that can’t be said for Xiaomi and Honor.
The battery life can vary widely depending on whether you’re on the go or on Wi-Fi at home
The Fairphone 5 allows you to monitor your battery health with an extra section in the battery section. you may see the health in percentage, how many charge/discharge cycles your battery has had so far, and what the full mAh count should be for the battery. There are additional features to keep your battery healthy over a long period of time, like a Battery Protect option that limits the maximum battery life to 80% or a charging mode selector that lets you slow or speed up the charge speed.
Fairphone upgraded its camera array to a trio of 50MP cameras front and back, with a 50MP IMX800 primary, a 50MP ultra-wide, and a 50MP selfie camera. On paper, this setup is promising and should be competitive, but it shows that photography and videography has become a software problem more than something that can be fixed through hardware alone.
Fairphone’s cameras offer significantly less dynamic range, with highlights easily blown out and shadows barely visible. It’s more in line with how a DSLR would take pictures, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s very different from the way other phones handle photography these days.
A gallery of sample images straight from the camera
You certainly have to accommodate for that when composing a shot. There are also some issues with oversaturation in tungsten lighting conditions, and some discrepancies in color science across the primary camera and the ultrawide lens. The camera still serves well for images that you don’t want to print out on a big canvas, and some of the color problems can be mitigated with a bit of editing.
Fairphone rolled out updated software in the midst of our review, complete with some improvements to the camera, and I do feel like both the oversaturation problem and HDR performance have both improved. I’m sure things will only get better with more software updates, and maybe we will see a GCam camera mod down the line that takes things even farther. However, as always, I can only judge the phone in the state it currently is in and not based on potential future updates. Overall, the camera is certainly serviceable — impressive, even, considering Fairphone has far fewer engineering resources than Google, Apple, and Samsung.
The camera software also isn’t as reliable as I would like it to be. For example, Fairphone doesn’t offer an automatic night mode, forcing you to manually enable it whenever you need it instead. The zoom controls are also more finicky than I would like them to be, with a single button letting you cycle between 1x, 2x, and ultrawide that also turns into a zoom slider when you hold and slide on it.
Competition
The Google Pixel 7, the Fairphone 5, and the Apple iPhone 13 next to each other
There isn’t really any comparable repairable phone out there that is sold as broadly as the Fairphone 5, but of course, we can’t look at the handset in isolation. At its £650 price tag, there is plenty of competition. First and foremost, I think of theGoogle Pixel 7, which offers a better build quality in a smaller body and a much better camera experience. However, Google only gives you five years of security updates and three big Android updates, with one of them — Android 14 — right around the corner today. Google also makes replacing parts much more complicated.
If you want a phone with a comparable lifecycle as the Fairphone 5, the iPhone 15 comes closest. Apple is known to support its devices for years to come, so it’s likely you could be able to use the iPhone 15 for the next eight to 10 years if you’re really pushing for it. While the iPhone isn’t self-repairable, Apple offers walk-in stores and mail-in service almost everywhere in the world.
Fairphone isn’t only about repairable hardware, though. The Fair in its name stands for its mission to build a fairer supply chain, with living wages for everyone involved building the phone, from engineers over factory workers to miners. The company also sources its materials as fairly as possible, making sure raw materials are either recycled or ethically mined. While Apple may claim that it’s on a path to provide the latter, too, I don’t think that workers in the lower parts of its supply chain are paid nearly as well as those working on the Fairphone. If your environmental and social impact is important for you, Fairphone is virtually peerless in this field.
Should you buy it?
The Fairphone 5 is a special phone. It shows the industry how repairable and fairly sourced handsets can be created without compromising too much on design and only a little bit on price. At the same time, these are exactly the points that make it hard to recommend for many people.
When you buy the Fairphone, you pay a high price for a phone that should last you for a long time, all while it’s unclear how well the hardware will hold up over the next eight years. For our planet and for the sake of social responsibility, the Fairphone 5 is still the best smartphone choice you can make. You’ll just have to consider how committed to the cause you really are before you pull the trigger on your purchase.
