Ethical ideals, solid build quality, dual SIM, expandable memory
Struggles to match rivals, screen not great, no 4G
Ethics don't normally come high on the list with selling points for smartphones, but it does with the Fairphone. Aside from the occasional biodegradable box and missing chargers or headphones, there's little fuss made about where parts are sourced from or how much workers are paid to provide them -- often not causes for celebration.
So far, the 'fair' bit of the Fairphone is a work in progress, with only two of the phone's component minerals sourced from conflict-free mines, but it's certainly a start. It's on sale in limited quantities now for around £250.
Design
The Fairphone looks different. Chunky, at 10mm deep and 163g, it's a weighty slab with a metal backplate and plastic trim -- the opposite configuration of many a smartphone. The cover's removable of course, allowing you to replace the battery rather than the phone if its life starts to fail. There's also room for two SIM cards in there as well as a microSD memory card.
Screen & Chassis The 4.3-inch touchscreen is covered with the same Dragontrail glass we've seen on Sony's Xperia Z series, and delivers a resolution of 960x540 pixels (256ppi).
This sub-HD resolution is a bit of a disappointment, especially considering the price, which would normally be enough to get you a full 1080p HD display these days.
It's running the now rather old 4.2.2 Jelly Bean version of Android, though it's been customised with a few new tweaks, like a page that highlights your last used and most used apps (handy) and a "Peace of Mind" widget, which offers a timed version of airplane mode -- no connectivity for up to three hours, though you can still play games and use offline apps. That aside, it's refreshingly free of bloatware, though you have full access to Google Play to fill up the 16GB of onboard memory with whatever you like.
Software & Processor The quad-core Mediatek (no Qualcomm Snapdragon here) 1.2GHz CPU is backed by 1GB of RAM, which seems a little underpowered these days. It's not slow, exactly, but it is on the sedate side when you're switching between apps; HD games don't always display at their best on the Fairphone either. It delivered a paltry 16,561 in our AnTuTu benchmark test, which looks rather pitiful next to, say, the latest Samsung Galaxy Note Edge's 47,624
Photography
The 8-megapixel camera comes with autofocus and an LED flash, plus a few extras like face recognition and panorama. It's a fairly basic snapper but can manage some decent pictures in good light. On the front is a 1.3-megapixel camera, which eschews the recent trend for better quality selfie snappers.
The battery managed a day's worth of steady use, but don't expect much more. Oh, and it doesn't come with charger or headphones, figuring that you've probably already got these left over from your last phone. It also doesn't expend unnecessary resources by producing them.
Conclusion The Fairview phone is very much a so-so midrange phone, with little in the way of frills and is let down by its low-res screen and uninspiring performance. Its ethical ideals are admirable but it will likely gain more sales by raising its spec to match that of price rivals like the Moto G. As such, it's a choice between paying for ethics, or paying less for a better device. We can't make that call for you.
Software: Google Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
