Fairphone is a pretty unique smartphone manufacturing company. This company does not just make smartphones and sell them. In the past, the company has made efforts to make its 1st generation smartphone out of materials that are ethically sourced. Its 2nd generation smartphone, the Fairphone 2, is made as much as possible from materials that are not sourced from countries in conflict or war. The company has an electronic waste recycling program in Ghana to curb the amount of electronic waste being discarded. This is to lessen the amount of potentially toxic electronic waste from being discarded openly in landfills. In addition, the company contributes part the proceeds from every Fairphone 2 sold to a workers welfare fund in China. Basically, the company wants to make good quality smartphones with excellent hardware, but it wants the phones that it manufactures to be made in the most humane way. In order to further tackle the electronic waste problem which some smartphone manufacturers are surprisingly silent about, Fairphone’s devices are designed to be hardy, easy to repair and upgrade.
The Fairphone 2 is a device that the company intends its customers to use for quite a long time, at least a few years. It is not as thin as a typical smartphone, the body of the device is composed of a touchscreen and the body is made of plastic that slightly sticks out at the edges to guard against an unexpected fall. The internal specifications are not as plain as the device of the body sounds like. The device uses the Android 5.1 (Lollipop) OS, has a quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801 processor And a 2GB RAM. It has an internal storage of 32GB. The front camera contains 1.9 megapixels and the rear camera, 8 megapixels. The rear camera is capable of taking videos in full HD quality. It has a 5-inch, 1080p display that comes with Gorilla Glass protection. The device supports 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks. It has dual band WiFi, Bluetooth, and radio capabilities. This device has dual-SIM slots.
If you need to repair the Fairphone 2, you can separate it into six parts for easy repairing without bothering about countless tiny parts getting lost somewhere under your couch. The six main parts are, the main PCB, display module, main camera, rear camera/speaker, microphone and detachable battery. The whole device is kept together with some necessary screws and the display is connected to the phone with a simple clip system. This allows for easy removal of the display from the main body of the device.
Fairphone has certainly caught attention for its efforts to have its devices manufactured as humanely as possible. If the company keeps this up, many potential customers will be challenged to know the origin of their own devices they are using and how it was manufactured.