REVIEW OF THE MONTH Fairphone 3
The Fairphone 3 is a noble project, but in raw specs you’re paying more for less
If you’ve ever wondered about the cost of going green, the Fairphone 3 makes it abundantly clear. Made using conventional methods, this phone would have cost around £150. As it is, you’ll need to spend around £400 to get your hands on a device that uses ethically sourced components made in factories that offer the gold standard in working conditions. Other upsides? This is the most modular and easy-to-fix phone on the market. So the question becomes whether this is a price you’re willing to pay, along with the indisputable fact that you can get so much more for your money if you put ethics to one side. Read our verdict on p70.
SCORE
PRICE €383 (€460 inc VAT) from fairphone.com
It’s no secret that phones are environmentally costly. The industry as a whole does its best to avoid showing how the sausage is made with greenwashing promises of recycling and factories using renewable energy, but ultimately our e-waste is an ecological timebomb, and two-year upgrade cycles are based on our human wants rather than the planet’s needs.
As someone who spends the majority of his time writing about tech, that presents a constant ethical quandary gnawing at the back of my mind. If you have similar concerns and want to put your money where your mouth is, Fairphone is the company for you. But there will be many compromises along the way.
The Fairphone promise
Wander into your local phone shop, and there’s no ethically clean choice on the menu. Phones are built by lowpaid workers in unpleasant conditions with finite precious metals, used for 24 months and then replaced. Very few are designed with repairability in mind: in most cases, you can’t even put in a new battery without voiding your warranty.
Fairphone takes a different approach, aiming to put sustainability and workers first. The former by designing handsets to be repairable by users, with components that can be reused to reduce e-waste; the latter by sourcing conflict-free (and ideally recycled) minerals, and by focusing on good conditions in its factories. The company openly admits that this is a work in progress, but it’s light years ahead of its competitors.
Admirable as this approach is, if you’re thinking that the result won’t be cutting-edge tech, you’re 100% correct. The Fairphone 3’s specs are distinctly middle of the road: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor and 4GB of RAM. That’s the same specification as our budget favourite, the £160 Motorola Moto G7 Power ( see issue 304, p90).
That’s awkward because the Fairphone 3, as environmentally friendly as it may be, costs €460 once you include delivery, which translates to around £400.
Contracts start at £28 per month at Vodafone with a £99 upfront cost. Moreover – for extremely sensible green reasons – that price doesn’t include a plug, cables nor earphones. If you were to put all environmental considerations to one side, and have around £400 to spend, then look no further than the £399 Google Pixel 3a ( see issue 304, p85).
Dated design
The Fairphone 3 has a dated look from the front. It has the kind of bezels that haven’t been seen on a smartphone for quite some time – especially at the top and bottom of its 18:9 aspect ratio screen. It comes with a thick rubberised bumper around the outsides to protect from drop damage, but this can be easily removed.
Flip it over and it looks a lot more distinctive – and largely in a good way. It’s a tinted, transparent plastic case, so you can see exactly what makes it tick. The word “Fairphone” is embossed in all caps, and the words “change is in your hands” are visible, printed on the battery underneath.
Before I get onto the main point where the Fairphone 3 leaves all other smartphones in the dust (repairability), I’ll just quickly highlight a couple of other key points. It uses USB-C charging, has a 3.5mm headphone jack, supports NFC, has two SIM-card slots and includes a microSD card slot supporting cards of up to 400GB in size. All good, consumer-positive stuff that’s to be applauded.
The repair factor
“In contrast, not only is the Fairphone 3 repairable, it includes a screwdriver in the box and detailed instructions on its website”
Most phones aren’t designed to be fixed by Muggles, and even the much-loved removable battery has long proved unpopular – of all the phones I looked at last year, only the Moto E6 Plus ( see issue 304, p92) let you substitute in a new cell. That isn’t great for consumers, but it’s far worse for the planet. “Reduce, reuse and recycle” are the three “Rs” of sustainability, and the phone industry is lousy at each of them.
In stark contrast, not only is the Fairphone 3 repairable, it includes a screwdriver in the box and detailed instructions on its website. Once you take off the phone’s plastic back and remove the battery, you’re presented with 13 tiny screws to pick out. These magnetically stick to the screwdriver, but they’re still fiddly. Once removed, you can simply pop out the screen by pushing it through where the battery compartment used to be.
This first step is necessary for all repairs. Once you’re in, Fairphone has instructions and tutorial videos on how to replace four modules in addition to the screen and battery – each of which is available from the official website’s spare parts shop. It’s important to state that while this makes it a modular phone, this isn’ t about upgrades: all of the components in the shop are direct replacements for hardware should it fail.
A new screen costs €90, which feels fair, but the asking price of €25 for a replacement back cover – a flimsy plastic thing – made my eyebrow raise a notch. A new battery costs €30, a camera module €50, a top module €30 and the bottom and speaker modules go for €20 each. Add all the spare part costs together and you come to around £230 – a bit more than the cost of a fully assembled
Moto G8 Plus.
Obviously, that’s not really the point. It’s absolutely brilliant that the Fairphone 3 can be repaired so easily by its owner, and, at the time of writing, the Fairphone 3 and Fairphone 2 remain the only
smartphones to get a 10/10 repairability rating from iFixit.
Fair screen, solid speed
The Fairphone 3’s 5.65in IPS screen has a resolution of 1,080 x 2,160, which is perfect for a compact display such as this. It’s also bright, peaking at 502cd/m2 in our tests, while contrast is excellent at 1,649:1. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a middling screen.
For instance, our colorimeter showed that, while it displays 95.3% of the sRGB gamut, colour accuracy is a weakness: its average Delta E of 3.31 is poor, while its maximum of 11.56 (for blues) is simply atrocious. More readily obvious to the naked eye is that the screen is reflective.
But the biggest issue for modern phone users is the screen’s size, which feels small compared to rivals. The thick bezels at the top and tail of it only add to this retro feel. It’s easily beaten by those found on cheaper handsets and you’d hope for better at this price, even if it can be easily replaced should it break.
The Fairphone 3’s specs are fair, but not in the way the company might hope. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor paired with 4GB of RAM provides solid day-to-day performance, but that’s all. The bloatwarefree installation of Android 9 helps to keep things running smoothly, but counter-intuitively for a phone that values sustainability, those specs will start creaking sooner than the Pixel 3a. And as you can see from the GFXBench Manhattan graphs on this page, things become starker when you run a gaming test.
Battery life is par for the course, with a running time of 14hrs 20mins in our test. That puts it a nose behind the Pixel 3a, but a whole Pinocchio proboscis behind the 5,000mAh battery of the Moto G7 Power.
Single camera
The Fairphone 3 has a single 12-megapixel rear camera with an aperture of f/1.8. This may sound weak in an age where triple-camera arrays are commonplace, but the similarly priced Pixel 3a includes a single camera and produces some of the best photos around. What’s more, the Fairphone 3 uses the same Sony IMX363 camera sensor.
At a glance, the Fairphone 3 performs reasonably well. Put it up against the Pixel 3a, though, and its results aren’t even close. Where you can see individual bricks from our standard rooftop shot on the Pixel 3a, they’re just a smudge of dark red on the Fairphone 3. It’s a similar story in low-light conditions, where the Fairphone suffers from far more visual noise than the Pixel.
The front-facing camera is an 8-megapixel affair with a f/2.0 aperture. The results are slightly lacking in detail, but good enough for video calls. If vanity is your main concern then chances are you’ll be looking at a more stylish looking handset anyway.
There’s no sugar-coating it, the Fairphone’s video is poor. It looks good on paper, with the phone offering support for 720p, 1080p or 4K video capture at 30fps (with 60fps for 1080p, which is weirdly listed as 120fps in the software due to a bug), but the footage is grainy and the camera struggles to maintain focus while panning. Both 720p and 1080p footage should be stabilised – there’s a toggle to enable stabilisation – but the video bounces all over the place.
In your hands
It’s difficult to review the Fairphone 3 fairly. It’s objectively weaker than similarly priced rivals, except in terms of repairability where it’s several magnitudes better. But that’s overlooking the Fairphone 3’s real USP of fairness. Fairness in the supply chains it uses, the factories in which it’s built and for the future of the planet. These things have their own price and it turns out it almost triples the cost of a handset.
With that in mind, it’s hard to put a score on the Fairphone 3 – it’s like comparing a slightly disappointing fair-trade apple with oranges farmed exclusively using slave labour. If environmentalism and fairness are the things you’re looking for, there simply isn’t any other choice. Although it is ironic that the older components used in the Fairphone 3 mean well-meaning buyers may be looking at upgrading sooner than their less conscientious brethren who instead opt for an unethically made flagship.
For that reason, the Fairphone 3 gets a two-star rating from us – with a bonus star for putting environmental concerns front and centre.
SPECIFICATIONS
Octa-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 4GB RAM Adreno 506 graphics 5.65in IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,160 resolution 64GB storage microSD slot 12MP rear camera 8MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 3.5mm headphone jack 3,000mAh battery
Android 9 71.8 x 9.9 x 158mm (WDH)
189g 2yr warranty