Fairphone has always been at the forefront of environmentally-friendly smartphones, as its devices are made with lots of recycled parts and from conflict-free materials. The company's launched a new handset now, perfect for people who want a green phone (green in eco-credentials, not color).
This new phone is the Fairphone 3 Plus, an improved version of the Fairphone 3 launched roughly a year ago. The front and rear cameras are now higher resolution at 16MP and 48MP respectively, its battery is a tiny bit bigger, and its body is made from a higher proportion of recycled materials than before.
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For the most part, the Fairphone 3 Plus is the Fairphone 3 - it has the same 5.85-inch FHD+ LCD display, a rear fingerprint scanner, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a Snapdragon 632 chipset, and 4GB of RAM.
In fact, it's so much the same phone that people who own the Fairphone 3 and want an upgrade don't actually need to buy the new handset - since that handset is easily and openly moddable, Fairphone 3 owners can simply buy the new camera array for a fraction of the price of the new phone, and attach it to the old phone to upgrade.
That's a good move in keeping with the environmentally-conscious nature of Fairphone, and should reduce e-waste a bit.
If you don't own a Fairphone 3 but want the 3 Plus, it's going to go on sale on September 14, though you can pre-order it now from the Fairphone website. The handset costs £425 (roughly $560, AU$775, though Fairphone doesn't sell phones outside Europe).
That's a little more than you'd normally pay for a phone with those specs, but you're also buying the peace of mind that you're helping the planet, which is hard to put a price on.
