Fairphone 5 + Murena /e/OS review, part 1: the phone
A suffering-free smartphone with a spy-free operating system sounds too good to be true. I decided to see if that was the case by buying a Fairphone 5 with Murena's /e/OS pre-installed.
Like it or not, the smartphone is an intrinsic part of our lives and it's no big secret that the average phone is terrible for human welfare and our privacy. Two companies however have taken it upon themselves to try and change that reality.
Fairphone
The Dutch company Fairphone[↗] has been working hard to solve multiple issues with the current smartphone market, including sustainability, repairability and human welfare. They've been fighting the good fight for over 10 years and all their phones are modular and contain only sustainably sourced, conflict-free metals.
I've known about Fairphone for many years and the Fairphone 5[↗] is actually my second handset from them. I had a Fairphone 2 back in the mid 2010s which was, I hate to say, a big disappointment. It was chunky, inelegant, slow and felt cheaply made (at least on the outside). Several apps I used daily on my old Samsung would crash regularly on the Fairphone and within a few months the rubber case was deformed and collecting pocket fluff. I replaced it very soon after with a Google Pixel 2 which I used from 2016 until January 2024.
I finally decided however, as part of my general migration away from Big Tech, to ditch my faithful Pixel and give Fairphone a second chance. Do I regret that choice, like I did last time?
Definitely not.
The Fairphone 5
The new Fairphone 5 is sleek, robust and while still on the chunky side, feels more pleasantly weighty in my hand as opposed to oversized. It also feels perfectly useable as a pocket computer, the previous generation CPU not noticeably slower than the fancy new Snapdragon that all the bleeding edge smartphones have now.
The reason for using an out of date CPU is also appealing - Fairphone promises a minimum of 8 years support for OS updates. That means they need a CPU which will remain supported by Android. To that end they've chosen to use a chip usually reserved for industrial devices, one which therefore needs to be supported for a longer duration than most people keep their consumer devices. This comes at the cost of speed but with the added benefit of a longer period of security updates.
The reviews I read beforehand complained for the most part about the camera. For my part I've not noticed any significant lack of quality but this could be due to the age and therefore relative quality of my previous phone. I'm also not a user of image-based social media so that side of the phone is also not as important to me.
The environment
One of the main selling points of the Fairphone is it's repairability. On their website they say the Fairphone 5 contains no glued-in components and is therefore fully modular. I've had my phone for less than a year and haven't yet come across any hardware issues, but taking off the back casing does reveal various well-labelled parts held in place with tiny screws.
On their website you can easily buy replacement components (even the screws!) to fix any issues yourself, and although they understandably aren't cheap, it's a lot less expensive than buying a whole new phone because you cracked your screen. Considering manufacturing a completely new handset also produces a lot of e-waste, it also seems pretty unnecessary to buy a bunch of new components each time only one of them has an issue. This together with the longevity of the hardware are the main ways Fairphone is helping protect the environment.
Human welfare
Another of Fairphone's objectives, and actually where it all started, is to construct phones without the use of conflict minerals and materials mined by children or through slavery. Despite Fairphone's growing popularity and the numerous articles about their business model, other smartphone manufacturers remain somewhat silent on this issue. To be honest, we also have Fairphone to thank that we're having a global conversation about it at all, as they've been campaigning against it since 2013, even before they started making phones themselves.
Strictly speaking this isn't really a feature of the Fairphone 5 (metal is metal after all) but it does make me feel good to know that the people doing the hard work to obtain materials for my smartphone are also being looked after by the people employing them. As the consumers with the buying power, it is really up to us to invest our money in things we believe to be important and Fairphone's mission aligns well with my social beliefs.
Summing up
In short, I'm more than happy with my Fairphone 5 and glad I decided to give them a second chance after my previous experience. Although heavy phone users might lament the lack of top of the range hardware, this is far outweighed by the satisfaction of knowing your phone is a lot less damaging to people and planet.
Pros:
- No blood on (in) my hands
- Modular and therefore easily repairable
- Designed to last
Cons:
- Quite pricey
- Chunkier than the average phone
In part 2 of this post I will take a look at the /e/OS operating system and the company installing it onto new phones, Murena.