Review: Fairphone 5

The Fairphone 5 is a unique proposition in the world of smartphones. Pick this as your next handset and you send a clear message that you believe in ethical sourcing of manufacturing materials, that the people who construct these devices deserve fair pay and safe working conditions, and that we should all have the right to repair. This antidote to planned obsolescence could even last you a decade.

Dutch company Fairphone has beat the odds to reach its fifth smartphone. It has clawed out a niche in a market so competitive that major companies like Microsoft, HTC, LG, and Sony have failed or struggled. The Fairphone 5 is the best smartphone the company has turned out by a margin, but measured against the similarly priced competition on hardware alone, it falls short. Let’s be honest—this phone is all about the mission.

Fairphone carefully sources the components in every device, and the workers who put them together have safe and healthy working conditions. Where possible, Fairphone uses recycled materials (plastic, tin solder paste, steel, and nickel alloy), sources Fairtrade gold, and buys cobalt and silver credits to support the improvement of working conditions for miners.

The factories that make the Fairphone pay a living wage to workers. It also employs 100 percent renewable energy. Fairphone invests in projects to reduce CO₂ emissions, and to balance bringing a new phone into the world, Fairphone recycles the equivalent amount of e-waste. It has a B Corp certification, which means its claims have been independently vetted, and Fairphone regularly releases impact reports.

Photograph: Fairphone

The Fairphone 5 is built to last nearly a decade. You can repair or upgrade the phone easily with a screwdriver. Fairphone sent me a screwdriver (they cost £4.50, or around $6) with the phone, and I can confirm it is easy to peel the back panel off to unscrew and remove components. Replacement parts are fairly priced. For example, a display is £90 (roughly $110), and the main camera is £62 ($76). Each phone comes with a five-year warranty.

This focus on longevity also extends to software support, with Fairphone promising an unprecedented minimum of five Android version updates and eight years of security updates. Google guarantees just three platform updates and five years of security updates. Samsung does slightly better, with flagships at four OS updates and five years of security updates. Apple generally brings six years of operating system updates to its iPhones.

Dominant phone makers like Apple and Samsung have made some moves toward carbon neutrality, recycled materials, and repairability, and sought to reduce the use of conflict minerals, but the Fairphone highlights how much more they could be doing. The Fairphone 5 is the most sustainable and socially conscious phone you can buy today.

Sustainability costs money. Compromises are inevitable, but I’m happy to report that the display is not one of them. This 6.46-inch AMOLED panel boasts a 2,700 x 1,224-pixel resolution and a 90-Hz refresh rate. It is responsive, colorful, and bright enough to remain legible in sunlight. There’s a touch more bezel than we’ve come to expect around the screen, and the body is a bit thick at 9.6 mm, but it does not stand out of the crowd.

The repairability of the Fairphone 5 has a minor cost embodied in the slightly bulky design and the IP55 rating, which means it’s fine in rain but cannot be submerged in the pool. The phone comes in blue, black, or with a more interesting transparent back plate that shows the removable innards, including a battery bearing the legend “Change is in your hands.” You need to peel off the backplate to insert your SIM card. There are volume controls and a lozenge-shaped power button with a fingerprint sensor on the right side.

Photograph: Fairphone

The Fairphone 5 is the only phone we have tested with a Qualcomm QCM6490 inside, because this chip is primarily intended for commercial internet-of-things applications. But there’s a good reason Fairphone didn’t go for one of the Snapdragon chips that typically power Android phones: Qualcomm promises longer support for this category than for its “consumer” chips.

When Google releases a new Android version, Qualcomm updates its drivers and integrates the code for its chips, before phone manufacturers make changes for the rest of the hardware and roll out the update. It's disappointing that Qualcomm promises only a measly three years for its Snapdragon range, which is partly why many manufacturers refuse to support more than three Android platform updates. The QCM6490 gets five years; after that, Fairphone assumes the responsibility for another three years.

Combined with 8 GB of RAM, the chip offers middle-of-the-road performance. It’s mostly smooth and responsive. Some apps take a beat longer than expected to load. After half an hour of Asphalt 9: Legends, the phone got a little warm around the camera module. I noticed the same thing when I shot a 10-minute video, but it’s on par with other midrange handsets. The Fairphone 5 is perfectly capable of casual gaming, dipping in and out of apps, and web browsing. How well this chip will stand up in a decade is tougher to predict.

Battery life is distinctly average. I had to charge the phone every night, and on one particularly busy day, with a lot of camera use and gaming, it struggled to get to bedtime without a top-up. But the relatively modest 4,200-mAh battery is removable, and you can buy a spare to swap in for just £36 ($45). There’s no wireless charging, but plug in a 30-watt adapter (not supplied), and it takes just over an hour to fully charge from zero.

The Fairphone 5 also has a microSD card slot, enabling you to expand the 256 GB of internal storage, but it misses out on the golden trifecta of yesteryear because there’s no headphone port. I do want to note that 256 gigabytes is not the norm for a phone at this price, so hats off to Fairphone for the upgrade. Sadly, the stereo speakers are tinny, so stick with headphones.

Cameras have become a battleground for the big phone manufacturers, and it’s easy to lose sight of how far they’ve come in recent years. It's only in this context that the Fairphone 5’s dual 50-megapixel camera can be described as disappointing. For the most part, I was pleased with the photos it captured in daylight, and the night mode is passable if you hold still.

The main lens nails details and produces a natural bokeh effect, employing pixel binning to turn out decent photos. It's paired with an ultrawide lens that has a macro mode for close-ups. (Both lenses are made by Sony.) The front-facing selfie lens is made by Samsung and packs 50 MP.

If we look a bit closer, there are definite weaknesses here. Image tuning is suspect. For example, the color difference between the main lens and the ultrawide is sometimes striking. Neither is true to life, with the ultrawide often producing drab colors and the main lens tending toward warm tones. The front-facing camera falls somewhere in between, struggling with mixed light, losing detail in shadows, and blowing out bright spots, but it’s good enough for the odd selfie.

Video capture goes up to 4K at 30 frames per second, and the main lens boasts optical image stabilization, though the Fairphone 5 gets warm if you record long videos. It performs better in HD and goes up to 60 fps, and there’s a fun slow-motion mode.

Viewed purely as a smartphone, the Fairphone 5 is mediocre, but there’s nothing missing. (Support for 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth are all present and correct.) If you want the absolute best bang for your buck, you can get the Google Pixel 7A or the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G for less. If you want something more powerful, the OnePlus 11 5G doesn't cost much more.

There are better smartphones for the money, but if you factor in the potential lifespan and easy repairability, you can see the value of the Fairphone 5. I enjoyed my time with it and rarely felt let down. For folks switching from older phones, it will feel like an upgrade. And how many phones come with a clear conscience? It’s tough to find ethical and eco-friendly electronics.

Choice is supposed to be one of the core benefits of capitalism. But the catch is that choices go away if you don’t buy them. If you care about Fairphone’s mission, vote with your wallet. Cynics may cry virtue signaling, but the Fairphone 5 is a rare endeavor, a tangible alternative to the status quo, and an example of how the smartphone industry could do things better. It's such a shame it's not available in the US.