Product Code Database
Fairphone is a Dutch electronics manufacturer that designs and produces and . It aims to minimise the ethical and environmental impact of its devices by using recycled, fairtrade and conflict-free materials, maintaining fair labor conditions throughout its workforce and suppliers, and enabling users to easily repair their devices through modular design and by providing replacement parts. , the company's most recent smartphone is the Fairphone 6, a highly modular and easily repairable device for which it plans to provide seven years of Android OS updates and eight years of security patches, as well as a five-year warranty.
Fairphone has been dubbed the most ethical smartphone in the world, scoring 98 out of 100 possible points by the British magazine Ethical Consumer.
In April 2015 the company became a registered B Corporation.
Since version two, the Fairphone is produced in Suzhou, China, by Hi-P International Limited.
In November 2021, the Fairphone 4 was made available.
As of February 2022, Fairphone had sold around 400,000 devices.
In 2023 a consortium of impact investors led by new shareholders Invest-NL, the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund, and existing shareholder Quadia, with its Regenero Impact Fund, invested €49 million in Fairphone.
| + !rowspan=2 | Name !rowspan=2 | Release date !rowspan=2 | SoC !colspan=3 | CPU !colspan=2 | GPU !rowspan=2 | Memory (GB) !rowspan=2 | Storage (GB) !colspan=2 | Display !colspan=2 | Camera !rowspan=2 | Initial Android version !rowspan=2 | Battery capacity (Ampere hour) | ||||
| Fairphone 1 | MediaTek MT6589 | Cortex-A7 | 1.2 | 4 | PowerVR SGX544MP | 286 | 1 | 16 +up to 64GB | 4.3 | 256 | 8MP | 1.3MP | 4.2.2 | 2000 | |
| Fairphone 2 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 | Krait 400 | 2.26 | 4 | Adreno 330 | 578 | 2 | 32 +up to 2TB | 5 | 446 | 12MP | 5MP | Android Lollipop | 2420 | |
| Fairphone 3 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 | Kryo 250 Gold+Silver | 1.8+1.8 | 4+4 | Adreno 506 | 600 | 4 | 64 +up to 2TB | 5.65 | 427 | 12MP | 8MP | 9 | 3060 | |
| Fairphone 3+ | 48MP (12MP output) | 16MP | 10 | ||||||||||||
| Fairphone 4 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G | Kryo 570 Gold+Silver | 2.2+1.8 | 2+6 | Adreno 619 | 950 | 6/8 | 128/256 +up to 2TB | 6.3 | 409 | 48MP OIS, 48 MP Ultrawide, (ToF + Color) sensor | 25MP | 11 | 3905 | |
| Fairphone 5 | Qualcomm Snapdragon QCM6490 | Kryo 670 Prime+Gold+Silver | 2.7+2.4+1.9 | 1+3+4 | Adreno 643 | 812 | 6/8 | 128/256 +up to 2TB | 6.46 | 50MP OIS, 50 MP Ultrawide, (ToF + Color) sensor | 50MP | 13 | 4200 | ||
| Fairphone 6 | 25 Jun 2025 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 | 8 | 256 +up to 2TB | 6.31 | 431 | 50MP, 13 MP Ultrawide | 32MP | 15 | 4415 |
The gold and silver in Fairphone 4 has the Fairtrade label, also metals used are said to come from conflict-free mines. The company promises a 5-year warranty period and long-term support for software updating and spare parts. In 2017, Fairphone's founder Bas van Abel acknowledged that it was currently impossible to produce a 100% fair phone, suggesting it was more accurate to call his company's phones "fairer".
In an interview with Will Georgi, Fairphone founder Tessa Vernink mentions:
“There might be a misconception that as a social enterprise, we don’t operate like a ‘normal’ business, but that’s not true. In many ways, most of our choices are the same — we still need to make money and sell phones — but the outcome and the goals are different. Our focus is investing in social innovation, instead of purely technical innovation. When other phone companies design a new phone, they research new technology — we research supply chain improvement.”A survey conducted by Franziska Verna Haucke in the Journal of Cleaner Production found:
A sustainable lifestyle represents the dominant factor explaining the involvement with the Fairphone. Surprisingly, the findings show that alternative consumption seems to negatively influence the involvement with the Fairphone and social commitment seems to play a minor role in the model. These aspects point to the Fairphone as a technical artifact, centered on a choice for a sustainable lifestyle.Shiftphone is another small mobile telephone manufacturer with a focus on sustainability, and also developed a modular smartphone. The founder of Shiftphone considers that the two companies working in collaboration could have more influence on bigger competitors.
The Fairphone 4 was one of the first TCO Certified smartphones, receiving its designation in 2021. However, the company had previously suggested its phones exceeded the TCO Certified criteria; indeed, a 2015 side-by-side comparison conducted by Südwind Association, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, and the GoodElectronics Network, found the Fairphone 1 to exceed industry standards on more sustainability and social criteria than even the TCO Certified label.
Fairphone has also received three consecutive annual Platinum ratings from EcoVadis, scoring as high as 88/100 in a rating system that covers four different categories measuring environmental and social metrics. This score placed Fairphone among the top 1% of businesses rated by EcoVadis worldwide.
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