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The environmentally conscious Fairphone 2 is now shipping

The environmentally conscious Fairphone 2 is now shipping

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Fairphone is starting to ship its easily repairable smartphone to customers today. All smartphones are, of course, repairable if you find the right place to ship them off to, but Fairphone wants to make repairing its phone simple enough that anyone can do it. You should be able to replace key parts of the Fairphone 2 — including the screen, camera, and main circuit board — without anything more than a screwdriver, so long as you buy those replacements from Fairphone. And like its predecessor, the original Fairphone, some metals used to make it, including tin and tantalum, are supposed to be sourced from conflict-free mines.

The Fairphone 2 was announced earlier this year and has been up for preorder. It's available for €529.38, only to residents of Europe. The phone has a 5-inch 1080p display, a Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM, and is running Android 5.1 Lollipop. That's nothing impressive, but the phone's strength is in how it's made, not what's in it. Fairphone also imagines that, in the future, it could offer upgrades through new repair modules; it wants each phone to remain workable for five years, preventing electronics from being wasted as often as they are today. Fairphone expects to ship the first 1,000 phones before the end of the year, with all preorders making it out the door by the end of January.