Fairphone 4 Review (2023) The First Ethically Produced Smartphone - Bollyinside (2024)

You can buy hundreds and hundreds of different phones today, and many of them are different in some way. Because of this, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd, so when a company does something different that turns out to be great, we should pay attention. At the very least, that is what the Fairphone 4 wants to do. It’s a big step up from what the company used to sell, but it’s just as durable and easy to fix.

Fairphone 4: Description

If you live in Europe, it’s something you should be aware of. Not because of what it can do necessarily, but because of what it is. If it worked better with North American networks, I would buy the Fairphone 4. It is also one of the most environmentally friendly and easy-to-fix phones you can buy. The Fairphone 4 is more than what its list of features shows. On paper and in normal use, it’s a high-end mid-range phone that gives you a mostly stripped-down version of Android 12 without any major problems.

It’s a good, basic phone, but the real story is how it’s made and what it’s made of. Over 80% of the people in the world have a smartphone. Most of these smartphones are made in ways that aren’t ethical or good for the environment. Whether it’s how metals are mined or how workers are paid, the phone in your pocket was made in a way that often hurts the planet and the people who live on it. That is, unless your phone was made by Fairphone, which is what the company says.

Pros and Cons

Fairphone 4: Specifications

Design and build

Fairphone says that the phone is made from “sustainable and fairer” materials, like recycled plastics and suppliers who are Fairtrade certified. The device is 10.5mm thick, which is thicker than the iPhone 13, which is 7.7mm thick. It is also a big phone, with big bezels and a big screen. The modular design of the Fairphone 4 is to blame for this extra weight. You can take off the back cover and remove the battery, just like on phones from at least ten years ago.

There are also screws in the phone’s pretty and easy-to-reach insides that you can unscrew to take it apart piece by piece. This is so you can buy new parts for your phone as it wears out and things break. You can buy a new battery, camera, earpiece, loudspeaker, USB-C port, and even display from Fairphone. This will encourage you to keep your phone for longer and fix it yourself. The power button, which also works as a fingerprint sensor, is on the right edge. Above it are two volume buttons. Aside from that, the bottom has a USB-C port and a speaker.

Even though it can be taken apart and fixed, the Fairphone 4 feels like a tank. Its rubberized case and plastic sides make it feel very sturdy. It doesn’t feel as high-end as some other devices, but it’s the best Fairphone so far. With an IP54 rating for dust and water resistance, it is not fully waterproof because it is made up of separate parts.

Fairphone 4: Display

The Fairphone 4 has a 6.3-inch screen, but the front-facing camera is in a “teardrop” notch at the top. Most phones, no matter how much they cost, now have “punch-hole” front-facing cameras, in which the camera is housed in a small hole in the screen. This makes a notch feel like something from the past.

The resolution here is 1080 x 2340, which is pretty much the same as all smartphones except for a few high-end or cheap ones. It’s an LCD display, so the colors aren’t as bright and the contrast isn’t as strong as on an OLED screen, but it’s easier to see in daylight than some OLED panels.

Some people might think that the phone’s 60Hz refresh rate is a little slow. This means that the image is updated 60 times per second, but many phones in this price range offer 90Hz or even 120Hz, which makes motion look smoother. The screen quality isn’t why you’d buy a Fairphone 4. It’s the phone’s most average feature, but we weren’t disappointed by it either.

Fairphone 4: Cameras

With the raised triangle module, the cameras look cool, but the results are, well, fair. Fairphone may have gone above and beyond with a 48MP telephoto, a 48MP wide, and laser autofocus, but it’s clear that the company doesn’t have the same resources as Google, Apple, and Samsung to throw at computational photography.

At first glance, photos are usually good enough to share on social media, but there are some problems. The phone has a tendency to blow out highlights, sometimes going for plain white where a Pixel would still find contours and details. This is especially hard when trying to take a picture of someone outside against a bright background or of a receipt. But shots with less contrast come out better.

Even with the night mode on, the cameras can’t compete with others in the same price range when there isn’t enough light. People are almost impossible to photograph when there is even a little bit of movement or the lighting isn’t great, and night mode doesn’t help much to brighten scenes much. The way Fairphone uses the feature doesn’t let you use zoom or the wide-angle camera, either. It’s also frustrating that the shutter button is so slow to respond, both in night mode and regular mode, that you might think you didn’t hit it right.

Fairphone 4: Performance

The Snapdragon 750G chipset is the “brain” of the Fairphone 4. This is a mid-range processor that we saw in the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G and the TCL 20 Pro 5G. It’s not the most powerful chipset in the world, but most people will be fine with it. We ran the phone through the Geekbench 5 benchmark test, and it got a multi-core score of 1798. This puts it in the same league as the Poco X3 NFC and Redmi Note 9T, which got scores of 1699 and 1799, respectively. That is about 200 points higher than the Galaxy A52 5G and 100 points lower than the TCL phone.

That’s an average amount of power, enough for “average” phone uses like social media, online banking, and low-end games, but not enough for video editing or high-end games. We played a few high-end games, and the experience was sometimes choppy, but mid-range games were fine. Depending on which option you choose, this chipset is paired with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage. As we’ve already said, you can buy a microSD card to add up to 2TB of extra storage, so if you don’t need the extra RAM, the smaller option may be enough.

Battery and charging

The Fairphone 4 can charge at 30W with a wired USB-C charger, but in keeping with its green image, it does not come with a charger brick or cable. It sells these accessories in the UK for £31.95 and £21.95 each. However, £31.95 is a very high price for a USB-C cable, even if it is made to last like this one is.

Many other Android phones can charge faster than 30W, but most Samsung phones can only charge as fast as 25W. If you already have a USB-C charger, it will work fine to charge the Fairphone 4. I tried it with both slow and fast chargers and it worked as expected. A 30W fast charger could charge it to 41% in 30 minutes. There’s no way to charge wirelessly here. In my everyday use, the battery life was good. It lasted until the end of each day and usually until the middle of the next day’s morning.

That was with a lot of screen time, photos, video calls, and games for a review, so I wouldn’t worry about the Fairphone 4’s battery life if I used it every day. The 3,905mAh cell is not the biggest, but you can buy another one from Fairphone for £25.95 and keep it as a backup for that long weekend when you won’t be near a plug.

Price and availability

Fairphone’s smartphones are only available in Europe right now, so if you don’t live there, don’t expect to buy this anytime soon. In the UK, the phone costs £499 (about $670, AU$930) for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. For £569 (about $770, AU$1,060), you can get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. If you don’t know how much space you need, you might want to think about the fact that both models have a microSD card slot that can add up to 2TB of space you can buy this smartphone directly from Fairphone’s official website.

Final Words

The Fairphone 4 is a big step forward for the company, and it’s the first one I can recommend to anyone who really wants a fair, repairable, and long-lasting phone. Even though there are some problems, like with the camera, the screen, and the motor that makes it vibrate, none of these are really deal breakers.

I’m so happy that Fairphone has finally chosen a processor that won’t be hopelessly underpowered over the next few years. But I still believe that iPhones are a close second. In the past, iPhones have had software updates for more than five years, which is longer than most other devices.

FAQs

Is Fairphone actually ethical?

Fairphone was the first company to use gold from Fairtrade in its phones. Apple uses 100% recycled gold in the wiring of the camera and on a lot of PCBs. Google only uses gold that doesn’t come from war zones, so it might be the worst in this group. Fairphone wants to use rare earth minerals that don’t come from areas where there are wars, but Apple says that it uses more recycled rare earth minerals.

Is Fairphone 4 dual SIM?

Standard Dual SIM Dual Standby (DSDS) technology is used in the Fairphone 4, just like in other Dual SIM phones on the market. Both SIM cards are ready to receive or make phone calls at any time. But you can only use one at a time for cellular data and one at a time for voice.