How lengthy have you ever been utilizing your present smartphone? The reply for an growing variety of customers is years, plural. After all, why improve yearly when subsequent 12 months’s mannequin is nearly precisely the identical because the system you’re holding in your hand?
Dutch social enterprise Fairphone sees this as a chance to promote sustainability. An opportunity to show a dialog about ‘stalled smartphone innovation’ on its head by encouraging customers to suppose extra critically in regards to the prices concerned in pumping out the subsequent shiny factor. And promote them on the financial savings — particular person and collective — of holding their staple gadget regular.
Its newest smartphone, the Fairphone 3 — simply launched this week in Europe — represents the startup’s greatest likelihood but of shrinking the comfort hole between the subsequent hotly anticipated touchscreen gizmo and a fairer proposition that requires an altogether cooler head to understand.
On the floor Fairphone 3 appears to be like like a reasonably commonplace, if barely thick (1cm), Android smartphone. But that’s primarily the purpose. This 4G telephone could possibly be your smartphone, is the meant message.

Specs smart, you’re getting principally middling, fairly than stand out stuff. There’s a 5.7in full HD show, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 chipset, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable through microSD), a 12MP rear lens and 8MP front-facing digicam. There’s additionally NFC on board, a fingerprint reader, twin nano-SIM slots and a 3,000mAh battery that may be eliminated for straightforward substitute when it wears out.
There’s additionally a 3.5mm headphone jack: The useful port that’s being erased on the premium smartphone tier,  killing off a bunch of wired equipment with it. So ‘slow replacement’ smartphone {hardware} demonstrably encourages much less waste throughout the gadget ecosystem too.
But the actual distinction lies below the floor. Fairer right here means provide chain innovation to supply conflict-free minerals that go into making the units; social incentive packages that prime up the minimal wages of meeting staff who put the telephones collectively; and repairable, modular handset design that’s meant to scale back environmental influence by supporting an extended lifespan. Repair, don’t change is the mantra.
All the additional effort that goes into making a smartphone much less ethically difficult to personal is after all invisible to the bare eye. So the Fairphone 3 purchaser largely has to take the corporate’s phrase on belief.
The solely visible proof is repairability. Flip the telephone over and a semi-opaque plastic backing offers a glimpse of modular guts. A tiny screwdriver included within the field permits you are taking the telephone to items so you possibly can swap out particular person modules (such because the show) in case they break or fail. Fairphone sells replacements through a spare components part of its web site.

Despite this radically modular and novel design vs at present’s hermetically sealed premium mobiles the Fairphone 3 feels extraordinarily strong to carry.
It’s not designed to pop aside simply. Indeed, there’s a full 13 screws holding the show module in place. Deconstruction takes work (and care to not lose any of the teeny screws). So that is modularity purely as occasional utility, not flashy occasion trick — as with Google’s doomed Ara Project.
For some that could be disappointing. Exactly as a result of this modular telephone feels so, nicely, boringly regular.
Visually probably the most stand out function at a look is the Fairphone emblem picked out in metallic white lettering on the again. Those taking a re-examination may also spot a moralizing memo printed on the battery so it’s legible by means of the matte plastic — which reads: “Change is in your hands”. It could also be a bit cringeworthy however should you’ve paid for an moral premium you would possibly as nicely flaunt it.
It’s truthful to say design followers gained’t be going wild over the Fairphone 3. But it feels virtually deliberately boring. As if — along with shrinking manufacturing prices — the purpose is to impress on patrons that moral internals are greater than sufficient of a hipster trend assertion.
It’s additionally true that the majority smartphones are actually a lot the identical, {hardware}, options and efficiency smart. So — at this greater mid-tier price-point (€450/~$500) — why not flip the buyer smartphone gross sales pitch on its head to make it about shrinking fairly than maximizing influence, through a boring however worthy commonplace?
That then pushes individuals to ask how sustainable is an costly however worthless — and so, philosophically talking, pointless — premium? That’s the query Fairphone 3 appears designed to pose.
Or, to place it one other approach, if regular might be moral then shouldn’t moral electronics be the norm?
Normal is what you get elsewhere with Fairphone 3. Purely judged as a smartphone its efficiency isn’t something to put in writing residence about. It checks all the same old packing containers of messaging, photographs, apps and Internet looking. You can say it will get the job finished.
Sure, it’s not buttery clean at each display screen and app transition. And it will probably really feel slightly sluggish on the uptake at instances. Notably the digicam, whereas pretty responsive, isn’t lightning fast. Photo high quality shouldn’t be horrible — however not wonderful both.
Testing the digicam I discovered photographs susceptible to excessive acutance and over saturated colours. The software program additionally struggles to deal with blended gentle and shade — that means you could get a darker and fewer balanced shot that you just hoped for. Low gentle efficiency isn’t nice both.
That mentioned, in good gentle the Fairphone 3 can take a wonderfully acceptable selfie. Which is what most individuals will count on to have the ability to use the telephone for.
Fairphone has mentioned it’s finished loads of work to enhance the digicam vs the predecessor mannequin. And it has succeeded in bringing picture efficiency as much as workable commonplace — which is a superb achievement at what’s additionally a barely decreased handset price-point. Though, naturally, there’s nonetheless a giant hole in picture high quality vs the premium finish of the smartphone market.
On the OS entrance, the telephone runs a vanilla implementation of Android 9 out of the field — preloaded with the same old bundle of Google providers and no added litter so Android followers ought to really feel proper at residence. (For those that desire a Google-free different Fairphone says a future replace will enable customers to do a wipe and clear set up of Android Open Source Project.)

In quick, purely as a smartphone, the Fairphone 3 presents little or no to shout about — so no screaming lack both. Again, if the purpose is to shrink the scale of the compromise Fairphone is asking customers to make so as to purchase an ethically superior model of electronics they’re slowly succeeding in closing the hole.
It’s a venture that’s clearly benefiting from the maturity of the smartphone market. While, on the mobile entrance, the transformative claims being made for 5G are clearly a few years out — so there’s no challenge with asking patrons to stay with a 4G telephone for years to return.
Given the place the market has now marched to, a ‘fairer’ smartphone that gives benchmark fundamentals at a wonderfully acceptable median however with the promise of decreased prices over the long run — particular person, societal and environmental — does look like a proposition that would increase from what has thus far been an distinctive area of interest into one thing fairly bigger and extra mainstream.
Zooming out for a second, the Fairphone definitely makes an attention-grabbing distinction with among the costly chimeras struggling to be unfolded on the prime finish of the smartphone market proper now.
Foldables just like the Samsung Galaxy Fold — which clocks in at round 4x the worth of a Fairphone and presents ~2x the display screen actual property (when unfolded), plus an influence bump. Whether the Fold’s lux bundle interprets into cellular utility squared is a complete different query, although.
And the place foldables might want to reveal a compelling use-case that goes above and past the Swiss Army utility of a traditional smartphone to justify such a whopping value bump, Fairphone want solely prick the buyer conscience — because it asks you pay a bit extra and accept rather less.
Neither of those gross sales pitches is problem free, after all. And, for now, each foldables and fairer electronics stay curious niches.
But with the Fairphone 3 demonstrating that moral can really feel so regular it doesn’t appear past the pale to think about demand for electronics which can be common in efficiency but pack an moral punch scaling as much as problem the mainstream parade of copycat devices.