PRICE £541 (£649 inc VAT) from shop.fairphone.com
It’s been two years since we reviewed the Fairphone 4 (see issue 328, p72), but this delay is deliberate: the Dutch company wants its phones to last for years. Buy the Fairphone 5 and you’re guaranteed five Android updates and eight years of security updates, and Fairphone hopes to extend the latter to ten years. And where the Fairphone 4 has eight separate parts that could be replaced by an owner, this update includes ten replaceable parts.
That’s great, but for the Fairphone 5 to be a success it must still meet expectations for speed and quality. Especially when it costs £649 for the one available spec, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; you can expand the internal storage via a microSD card.
■ A modular approach
The most important aspect of the design, of course, is that it’s modular. Nothing
