I ’ve been dreaming of a modular smartphone since I first laid eyes on Google’sProject Ara . The concept made so much good sense to me , a person who has built PCs before and is n’t afraid to attack a telegram ( as long as it is n’t live , of trend ) . But despite the relative exploiter - friendliness behind the theme of swappable mental faculty , Project Arafailedto make it to the real world .
Other modular smartphones have get and run , but the one with the most staying world power thus far isFairphone , an almost modular and repairable smartphone from the Netherlands . Unfortunately , it remains limited to overseas availability , but the fact that we ’re now on Fairphone 4 is something that should be extol considering that so many others have break .
What’s Inside
The Fairphone 4 coterie in some somewhat telling specs , making it a definite rise from theFairphone 3 + . The Android telephone has a larger 6.3 - in Full HD+ display . It runs on a Snapdragon 750 GB with 6 GB of RAM in spite of appearance and 128 GB of store . The extra bit of store helps the twist find more antiphonal than its mid - range processor suggest . Fairphone also boasts that this is the first 5G - capable modular smartphone , though it only work on sub-6Ghz bands and does n’t support radical - fast millimeter - wave spectrum . I am using the Fairphone 4 with a SIM from Mint Mobile , but I do n’t get 5 G service at my household ( not surprising ) .
The Fairphone 4 has a 3,905 mAh battery , which is obliterable like the phones you used to own back in the day . At first , I was worried about the phone ’s barrage fire life , but then I remembered that you could theoretically take a spare part with you in a bag and swap it out if there ’s no agency to institutionalise . Fairphone say the battery live on up to 200 time of day of consumption while idle . It can also charge up up to 50 % in half an hr with at least a 20W charger . There ’s no charging cable or power brick in the corner , so you ’ll have to render your own with the appropriate wattage to enable flying charging .
The Fairphone 4 sports dual 48 - megapixel rear lenses with a supporting sensor and a 25 - MP selfie camera . The primary tv camera is a Sony IMX582 sensor with an f/1.6 aperture and both color and time - of - escape sensors . There is 8x digital zoom potentiality , along with up to 4 K video gaining control at 30 fps and up to 240 Federal Protective Service slow - motion capabilities . you may decidedly make some depicted object with this camera .
Would you swap out your new flagship smartphone for a more affordable, sustainable one?Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
The Fairphone 4 has no headphone diddly-shit . While it may seem like an antithesis to the company ’s sustainability claim , I think this make the most common sense view where we ’re at before long . Bluetooth headphone are a dime bag a dozen , as rife as the wired earbuds that came packaged with our earpiece in past times . The deficiency of an audio jack might also make it easy for the Fairphone 4 to keep on its modularity . Fairphone does n’t let in a USB - C adapter to add together a earpiece mariner , so if you want to go wired , you ’d have to buy it individually .
At £ 499 , or a little under $ 700 , the Fairphone 4 offers some solid features for the price . But do n’t have a bun in the oven the Vanessa Stephen and whistle you ’d get with a Samsung flagship , for instance , because that sort of feature exclusivity comes at a cost : a telephone set you ca n’t repair yourself .
Still , Fairphone include a fingermark scanner embed in the major power push , NFC for contactless payments , and a microSD bill of fare for extra warehousing . The company pee-pee another Fairphone 4 with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage for £ 569 , or about $ 760 . Fair offers an lengthy five - year warranty , admit the guarantee of spare character until at least 2027 , as well as long - term software support .
The Fairphone 4 can be easily taken apart.Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
The Fairphone 4 runs on Android 11 , and the company says it will receive software updates up to Android 13 . And though the company aims to stick out Android 14 and 15 down the line , you might have to upgrade your chipset to make that possible . That should n’t be a problem , of course of study , because the whole point of the Fairphone 4 is that it ’s a long - last machine .
What It’s Like to Use
The aim of the Fairphone 4 remind me of Motorola ’s line of budget smartphones , the Moto G series . There is a bit of blockiness to the speech sound , which is something I have n’t had to get by with since flimsy smartphones became the standard . Frankly , this is the design consequence that I can see making the Fairphone 4 hard to sell . Then again , if you ’re the type of person who appreciates tinker with a twist ’s insides , you might not find the Fairphone 4 is two mm heavyset than gimmick like the OnePlus 9 .
I have n’t had enough meter with the Fairphone 4 to really put it through its tempo , though I be after to use it for for a while and see how it fare with daily consumption . But after a few days with the first modular smartphone I ’ve used since that Project Ara developer league I attended long ago , I can attest that it ’s good !
The Fairphone 4 is capable using apps like Pokémon Go , Office 365 , and Google Chrome . In a Geekbench 5 test of overall system performance , the earpiece score 638 in single - core and 1859 in multi - core tests . These are n’t Samsung or Apple flagship loads , but you ’re not getting a cut - edge flagship here . Geekbench ranked the Fairphone 4 ’s performance higher than the Samsung ’s solidly mid - range Galaxy A71 , which runs on a Snapdragon 730 ( and cost about $ 450 at launch last year ) .
Finally, a removable battery in an Android device!Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
I played with the camera stage setting a chip , too . They ’re laid out much differently than what you ’d see on the Google Pixel ’s camera app , for instance , and there were a few times I had to wait for the app to finish take the photograph before moving on to the next scene . And while the images taken with Auto HDR are vibrant enough to partake in online , you could easily see where the camera struggles when it ’s indoors . The photographic camera can also surge in quite a flake , but the result is excessively pixelated .
Clearly , we have some work to do before a modular phone ’s camera is as in effect as a flagship iPhone , for representative . But maybe we can get there .
Removable, Repairable Parts
The Fairphone 4 is as modular as its predecessors . you could swop out seven modules , from the USB - C larboard that charges and delivers audio , to the loudspeaker and headphone . The photographic camera are swappable , too . you’re able to also replace the exhibit for less than $ 100 , and all it command is removing and keeping track of eight tiny screws . The Fairphone 4 , in especial , is one of the few devices you ’ll see with the 10/10 iFixit repairability score , and that ’s because you could cursorily take it aside yourself . ( The others that have earned a 10/10 are , of class , earlier Fairphones . )
I have n’t yet full taken apart the Fairphone 4 , though I did take out its speaker system and USB - C module , which are both offer as spare contribution . It was absurdly loose to do with a Phillips 00 screwdriver , though I ’ve build up PCs and mechanical keyboards so I ’m well-situated with poking and urging at racing circuit . I was upset at one point that I ’d mess up up the connection between the USB - speed of light and the rest of the machine , but the Fairphone 4 turn back on after I reseated it . It ’s charge as I type .
Fairphone says its mission is to set an example for the technical school industry , to show that it ’s potential to construct electronics ethically while also being commercially successful . It ’s loose for technical school companies to hype their sustainability elbow grease , but they could also do more to annihilate the pile ofe - wastecontributing to mood change by making it easier for people to protract the lives of their devices .
It’s almost way too easy to remove screws from inside the Fairphone 4, but I suppose that’s the point!Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Although the Fairphone 4 is n’t directly provide in the U.S.—it ’s only available in prize European res publica — it does derive at a meter that theRight to Repairmovement in the U.S. is picking up steam . Though there have n’t been any new laws do just yet , theFTChas begun carry out new policies that will hopefully push companies toward making their twist actually repairable . And with Fairphone as a partner in the Right to resort campaign , I imagine Fairphone 4 will be used as an exercise of how to a repairable telephone set could be manufactured .
But I ca n’t help but feel like humanity needs a philosophic fracture before modular , repairable gadget become the norm . Smartphones are sell to us free-base on their new capableness , and the whole point of the marketing simple machine is to make us want the newest , shining thing . I could see the Fairphone 4 appealing to buyers of mid - range telephone who might not be concerned in the latest and greatest but need to promote or prepare parts as they see fit . ( It would be dainty if you could upgrade the system - on - chip like you may on a PC , but that ’s not potential — yet . ) The Fairphone 4 shows that it ’s possible to make an affordable , modular headphone . It remains to be get a line if any other tech ship’s company will even try .
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The Fairphone 4 is a nice phone, but it’s got some work to do before it is flagship-level “ooh.”Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
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Image: Florence Ion / Gizmodo (In-House Art)
I was admittedly reluctant to do this, but here I’m holding the USB-C module from the Fairphone 4.Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
It looks like a regular phone from afar, though it’s totally fixable by me.Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
