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Fairphone, the phone that lasts

September 11, 2019.

Fairphone 3.

Fairphone 3. © iFixit.

Dutch company Fairphone builds Android phones for durability, making them cheap and easy to repair. So easy, in fact, that you can make your own repairs with a simple Phillips 00 screwdriver, included with your purchase. Further, Fairphones are built with fair-trade, recycled materials, are modular, and use a removable, long-lasting battery. The new Fairphone 3 comes with a Snapdragon 632, 4Gb of RAM, 64Gb of storage, extendable with a MicroSD card, a 14.5cm (5.7 inches) Full HD display and a 12-megapixel camera. Available for preorder for EUR450 (tax in, CAD655), for delivery in October. You can also order parts on the company’s web site, like a display (EUR90), a battery (EUR30), a rear shell (EUR25), or even a loudspeaker module (EUR20). The iFixit team decided to test the company’s claims and, after a complete teardown of the Fairphone 3, gave it a repairability score of 10/10. The smartphone heavyweights (Apple, Samsung, Google, etc.) should take a page out of this small company’s book… especially Samsung, whose repairability score for the Galaxy S10/S10e is a lacklustre 3/10.

iFixit, “Fairphone 3 Teardown.”

Ars Technica, Jim Salter, “iFixit tears down the newest Fairphone—how repairable is it?.”