Part 1/5:
Fairphone 5: A Sustainable Smartphone with Compromises
Before you grab your pitchforks, I'm going to keep the Fairphone 5 around. I'm a big believer in their mission to build more repairable, more sustainable, and more ethically sourced phones. And with software updates planned all the way through 2031, there is plenty of time for improvements.
To be fair to Fairphone, the two handsets we evaluated were final prototypes, not part of the retail production run that started shipping to customers two weeks later. Fairphone revealed that in the ramp up to full production, they turned up some cases of bad soldering, mic failures, and antenna issues that were solved for the mass production run.
Migration to the Fairphone was painless