Cell phone repair can be exhausting sometimes as it takes up a lot of your time and can force you to travel a lot to find the best cell phone repair shop. This is a problem which is faced by almost every person around the world but now it has been taken care of by the new phone in the market which is known as Fairphone. Cell phone repair has never been this easy since its launch and all thanks to the Fairphone and its 3 models users can repair it easily by themselves. With a modular design, Fairphone devices allow components such as the display screen, battery, USB ports, and cameras to easily be exchanged, repaired, and customized by their owners.
With your fingernail, peel off the back cover to reveal a bright inside with patterns and shapes, as well as the statement “Yours to open. Yours to keep.” If you look closely, you’ll notice that each component is held in place by only a few little Phillips screws, allowing for easy cell phone repairs. Fairphone says it will provide a five-year guarantee on those components as well as basic software upgrades until 2025.
The Fairphone 4, which costs 579 pounds (about $653) and is the company’s highest-end model yet, is a new method to create a Smartphone. (Fairphone has no intentions to make it available in the United States.) However, although the phone works as a statement on sustainability and easy cell phone repair, it’s riddled with trade-offs as a product, with far too many little flaws you’ll never notice. Still, those issues have less to do with the Fairphone 4’s repairable nature than with Fairphone’s status as a small phone maker with limited resources and buying power. The Fairphone 4 proves that easy-to-repair phones are possible, but they won’t be truly great until bigger companies start taking the easy cell phone repair idea seriously.
Size and Water Resistance
The size of the Fairphone 4 is the most evident repair compromise. Its 6.3-inch display is standard for a smartphone, but at 0.41 inches thick, it’s around 30% thicker than both an iPhone 13 and my Pixel 4A 5G, and it feels substantial in the hand. The screen is surprisingly simple to remove and reattach, it takes about five minutes, making it the easiest cell phone to repair.
The phone’s aesthetic compromises seemed like a fair trade-off. People are willing to accept an easy-to-repair phone that’s merely splash-resistant instead of fully waterproof. People rarely drop their phones into a body of water, and even waterproof phones can lose their protective seals, endangering them in the pool. So, the idea of easy cell phone repair is all cool and fun until you drop it in the water.
Camera
Consider the camera, which is said to be the Fairphone 4’s most significant upgrade over prior generations. The camera system on the back has two 48-megapixel sensors—one wide and one ultra-wide – as well as a 3D time-of-flight sensor to aid autofocus. While this may appear to be competitive with other midrange smartphones, the camera has a slow shutter and is prone to generating lousy images in practice. Well, if you want an easy cell phone repair then you have to compromise on different things and the camera is one of them.
When we used the rear camera to take images of a model, light from a neighboring window washed out one side of the face, and the stubble on the face became blurry. On a cloudy day, the Fairphone 4 failed to capture any of the cloud detail captured by my Pixel 4a 5G, resulting in a white sky instead. Fairphone claims to be working on camera upgrades via software and firmware updates, but that’s exactly the problem: building an Android phone isn’t as simple as cramming a bunch of parts into a case and installing an operating system. Phone producers must spend a lot of time improving and optimizing software, frequently in collaboration with component manufacturers like Qualcomm. That’s a tough order for a little firm like Fairphone, which will never be able to compete with Apple, Google, or Samsung in the computational photography space but these companies do not come in the easy cell phone repair category.
Conclusion
Despite all of my complaints, we appreciate what Fairphone is doing and believe people who value sustainable design above all else may be able to tolerate its compromises. Fairphone also deserves praise for its work in using recycled materials and pushing for fair working conditions in the supply chain. But using the Fairphone 4 mostly made me wish other companies-ones with more resources to throw at building better phones-were more committed to easy cell phone repairs. Fairphone is the future of the phone industry only if big companies follow the trend or the founder of the fairphone finds huge investments. Nonetheless, fairphone will still be called the pioneer of the easy cell phone repair models.