A heart-warming injection of ethics; full marks for repairability; some interesting software ideas
Expensive; ugly; slow camera; dated hardware
The Fairphone 2 is a phone for those who don't want to have to deal with the gnawing guilt that their phone is, in a small way, terrible for the planet and the human race as a whole.
It is rather a pity that the phone itself isn't nicer to use, given its price comes with a predictable premium for the morally superior manufacturing process.
Before looking at what sort of phone the Fairphone 2 really is, it's worth examining the claims the company makes about how this particular mobile pie is baked. So how fair is it?
There are three prongs to the Fairphone 2 approach: ethical mining, better conditions for factory workers and creating an easy-to-repair design that'll allow the more intrepid among you to attempt to fix your own phone.
This does not mean Fairphone has revolutionised the manufacture of phones, though. The actual route from component to completion appears fairly conventional.
The Fairphone 2 is manufactured by Hi-P International, at a mid-size factory in Singapore. It has made everything from phones to coffee machines in the past, and appears a pretty standard contract manufacturer. "Our goal is not to 'police' our suppliers," explains Fairphone's marketing material. "Instead, we want to gain a better understanding of the underlying social and environmental challenges and work together with our production partners and third-party organisations to address them throughout the course of our partnership."
This entails creating a "Worker Welfare Fund" designed to let factory workers address their concerns. The rather small size of Fairphone as a company and its production runs means this is going to be a rather modest fund. Fairphone does mandate minimum wages, but its production partners are yet to introduce a living wage. Of course, you'd hope working conditions would have been part of the decision to partner with Hi-P in the first place.
The first Fairphone used a similar system, and the Workers Welfare Fund ended up with total funding of $125,000, having sold 60,000 units.
On the other side, Fairphone's talk of ethical mining is about support for third-party organisations too. Fairphone doesn't mine for raw materials. It doesn't even make its own components. However, it is working with other organisations to source elements like gold, and recently announced its hand in setting up the "first-ever Fairtrade gold supply chain for the consumer electronics industry".
Before buying a Fairphone 2, though, you need to consider the limits of what a small company can really offer in terms of an 'ethical' mass-produced phone. Its struggle is valiant, but it's far from easy. And it may amount to less than you hope for.
On the surface Fairphone's support for ethical mining of resources sounds like the technological equivalent of transparent sourcing of meat. Once you dig down into Fairphone's documentation, most of this amounts to labelling the companies that make the Fairphone 2's components. Take a look and you'll find a lot of the same bits used by other phone manufacturers.
The wording of Fairphone's documentation is also careful not to make promises. There are plenty of "aims" and "objectives", but very little in the way of concrete standards set.
WIRED doesn't doubt Fairphone puts a little more thought into the ethics of its manufacturing than some phone, but to call this an end-to-end solution for the industry's problems is to be blinded by the company's lengthy blurb. It's most useful as an awareness project, especially given Fairphone is a profit-making social enterprise, not a charity.
The ethical stance does form a big part of the Fairphone 2's appeal, though, because the phone itself is dumpy. This is a modular handset, but not in the vein of Google Ara, a concept phone made almost entirely of interchangeable parts.
Instead, the Fairphone 2 is best thought of as easily repairable. Little clips on the phone's bottom edge let you split the device in half and gain access to the innards. Fairphone's online store sells components separately on its website, although you'll still need to identify exactly what's wrong with the phone to solve any issues.
This is the most interesting part of the Fairphone 2 from a tech perspective, and while WIRED managed to avoid destroying the phone, it's a neat way for the tech savvy to avoid rip-off phone repairers.
The modular style is just for repairs rather than upgrades, though, and is what leaves the Fairphone 2 a chunky style vacuum. For a 5-inch phone it is very large and rather thick at 11mm. The rubbery plastic cover doesn't look or feel good either. This must be the least stylish phone in the £450 price range.
There are no advanced features either. Just looking at the hardware you could believe the Fairphone 2 was released in 2014. The now-ancient LG G3 used the same Snapdragon 801 CPU and the Fairphone 2 also lacks a fingerprint scanner or NFC. An awkwardly-placed power button further dates the design.
For a phone with an obvious appeal for a better-informed tech buyer, it's rather simple. It does have a generous 32GB storage, though, which can be added to using a microSD card. This phone provides enough to get by, which would be just fine if the Fairphone 2 wasn't quite so expensive.
Case in point: the screen. The 5-inch 1080p IPS display has a 446ppi pixel density, easily enough to appear flawlessly sharp. But its colours are less punchy than those of other phones at the price and more in line with a sub-£250 handset.
A lot of dated technical elements have to be offset against its appealing backstory. It's something of a surprise, then, that Fairphone has gone to the effort of making its own custom Android user interface, something that takes a lot of time and money to get right.
It has some interesting ideas, too. The Fairphone 2's main homescreen is a standard one that lets you fill as you please, but the other two are quite different. To the left is one auto-filled with favourite and recent contacts, while to the right is a home screen decked-out with recent and most-used apps.
The Fairphone 2's interface is built around the idea most of us only use a handful of apps and contact a handful of people 99 per cent of the time. There's also a secondary shortcut to favourite apps accessed by flicking from the right of the screen.
At the bottom of the apps menu there's an area where apps not used for a month or more end up. Think of this as a "please delete me" section. When you load an app the Fairphone 2 also lets you know how much it will dig into your privacy.
While the Fairphone complicates Android's layout, and is a little convoluted in parts, the interface's presumptive style will work for a lot of people. Its performance is less than perfect, though.
The Fairphone 2 suffers from some glitchy transitions on occasion, app loads are slower than other £400-500 phones and there are a fair few bugs left to quash. Some are quite annoying, such as how the backlight flutters violently in certain lighting conditions, the ambient light sensor seemingly unable to pick a single brightness level.
Using Android 5.1 rather than 6.0 Marshmallow may be partly to blame for the slightly slower feel, but it's most likely down to a lack of optimisation.
WIRED doesn't think the older hardware is to blame here. While the Snapdragon 801 chipset is old and 32-bit rather than 64-bit, it remains capable. More capable than its Geekbench 3 score of 2,874 suggests, a score that places it below some lower-mid-range phones. The Snapdragon 801 has an Adreno 330 GPU, which is more powerful than the Adreno 405 used in many of today's cheaper rivals.
The Snapdragon 801 is out of date, but has some life in it yet.
This phone's camera also doesn't really match the price. It's no better than some entry-level cameras on handsets such as Motorola Moto G. The Fairphone 2 uses an Omnivision OV8865 8-megapixel sensor, of an unremarkable 1/3.2-inch size.
In daylight it can produce good photos, not appearing to miss out on a huge amount of detail compared to 12-megapixel and 16-megapixel alternatives. But the results are often scratchy-looking even with decent lighting, and as the sensor is non-stabilised its night photos are not great, and slow to take.
WIRED took the Fairphone 2 and Huawei P9 out for a photo shoot in Oslo, Norway, and there was no competition. The Huawei is far better, producing cleaner, more detailed photos. It was also much faster to shoot.
Like other parts of the Fairphone 2, the camera feels under-optimised. There's significant shutter lag, causing a delay between pressing the shutter button and the exposure. And while there's a custom version of Android here, the camera app is Google's own remedial one.
Even phones that use a near-vanilla Android interface tend to paste over the camera app, and with good reason. It's one of the weaker parts of Android. This is compounded by an overly simplistic approach to exposure metering. Choosing a focus point reverts the Fairphone 2 to spot metering, where the ‘brightness' level is based solely on that point. As a result, radically overexposed or underexposed shots are very common unless you're careful.
The Fairphone 2's front camera is basic too, its 2-megapixel Omnivision producing soft-looking selfies. It also suffers from the same annoying shutter lag as the front camera.
These are not low-quality sensors, but the slow shooting speed and that the tech lags behind virtually every other phone at the price is hard to swallow. The speaker also struggles to compete. While fairly loud, the single rear-mounted driver is harsh-sounding at top volume.
Given how chunky the phone is, WIRED was a little disappointed by the just-ok battery life. A Fairphone 2 will last you a full day most of the time, but its 2420mAh battery is small for a device with an ageing CPU architecture and a 1080p screen.
Fairphone has a catchy selling point. Phones manufactured with more care for the environment and those making them have an obvious appeal. That said, the Fairphone 2 is not a particularly attractive handset on its own merits. A modular style is great news for the clumsy, but its design lacks flair and the hardware is matched by some phones half the price.
Updated 19/04/16, 16:55: This review omitted that Fairphone is a social enterprise company. This detail has been added. We also originally stated that Fairphone does not mandate a minimum wage from its production partners. Fairphone does mandate a minimum wage, but not a living wage.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
