If you’re in the market for the latest flagship smartphone of a well-known brand, regardless of how or where the device is manufactured and what happens to it once it’s broken, then move on, there’s nothing to see here for you. However, if you care about the environment but still need a more or less current smartphone, look for easy repairs and longevity as well as fair conditions for the people involved in building it, you should seriously consider joining the Fairphone movement. The Dutch company Fairphone already made it to the media with their first phone about two years ago, being the first (and supposedly only) manufacturer focusing not on features or the latest equipment, but on fair and socially acceptable production. This includes fair conditions for workers of course, but they also try to get the necessary minerals out of mines that are not financing any civil wars, which is seemingly a big problem.
Today the manufacturer announced the immediate availability of its new Fairphone 2 for pre-order.
This time we’re looking at a 5 inch LCD Display with Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080), Android 5.1 Lollipop powered by a Snapdragon 801 at 2.26GHz that is backed by 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The internal memory is noted as 32GB of eMMC5 and can be extended by use of a microSD card (of yet unspecified size). The phone supports two Micro-SIM cards as well as 4G LTE-Advanced with maximum up- and downlink speeds of 50 Mbps and 150 Mbps respectively (Cat. 4). Of course there is Wi-Fi on board with 802.11 b/g/n and even ac standard at 2.4 and 5 GHz allowing for maximum speeds of 433 Mbps. Bluetooth 4.0 LE and GPS are included as well as an 8 MP rear-facing camera with a 2.2 aperture and a front-facing 2 MP shooter for quick selfies. The (naturally) replaceable battery is said to boast 2420 mAh which should probably take you through a full day if you don’t do anything fancy with it. You get a micro USB-B 2.0 port and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on the wired side of connection possibilities and a so called expansion port on the back that is USB 2.0 compliant as well. The phone also has loads of sensors, i.e. for ambient light and proximity, a 3-axis compass, 3D accelerometer and a 3D gyroscope, all packed into simple but obviously functional casing that measures 143mm x 73mm x11mm, weighing 148g plus an additional 20g for the external case.
The device is clearly stated to be aimed at the European market (4G bands 3/1800 MHz, 7/2600 MHz and 20/800MHz) and is supposed to be delivered by November this year. The company is currently trying to get to 15’000 pre-orders to actually start building it, and it will set you back about 575 US$, or 529.38 €.