article-header

Product

Choosing what matters for the Fairphone 5 battery

Product

We’re extremely proud of the Fairphone 5 battery. You’ve heard us sing its praises before, and we’re about to do it again: this battery is a small-but-mighty symbol of Fairphone’s mission to build fairer electronics. We’ve integrated fair lithium and Fairtrade gold in its supply chain. Its cobalt supports improved working conditions for artisanal and small-scale miners. The manufacturer is committed to the highest standards of CO2 reduction and social auditing. And it’s the first battery to support living wages for the factory workers who make it.

When it comes to fair specs, the Fairphone 5 battery is currently best-in-show.

New battery benchmarks

A new benchmarking study from DxOMark praises its “great overall charging efficiency” and “low residual power drain,” which are important considerations for a phone’s energy usage, and especially important for an overheating planet when that energy comes from fossil fuels. Less positively, the report concludes that “when compared to other devices in the Premium segment, the Fairphone 5 [battery] finds itself in the lower half because of the weak performances in autonomy and charging.” Ouch.

“Autonomy” is the length of time the phone remains on after disconnecting it from the charging cable. DxOMark used robots in Faraday cages to measure how long the battery kept going while doing tasks like constantly making calls or constantly listening to music (what’s on the robot’s playlist?). We performed well on those metrics, less well when the robots were streaming video and gaming (Please tell us the robots play Minecraft!).

When it comes to charging, our numbers for how long it takes to charge the battery and how much juice you get from a quick five-minute recharge were middling at best, and the discharge rate for tasks on the move were higher than we’d like.

The phone’s poorest performance was in “mixed use” testing, where actual humans walked around with the phone doing actual phone things like social media and switching between cell towers.

We agree there’s room for improvement, not so much with the battery itself, but the way the phone is consuming energy.

People and planet first

In the ten years we’ve been making phones, Fairphone has steadily climbed in quality because we’ve listened and responded to performance issues like this. The DxOMark study has already sent our engineers scurrying to the studio with ideas for making battery improvements a priority. They expect some of the autonomy issues can be improved through the magic of software and tweaks they can make through operating system updates. We love operating system updates: we’ve committed to keep providing them for Fairphone 5 right up through 2031.

But in some cases, a trade-off is simply a trade-off. And when we have to decide between competing priorities, we prioritize people and planet – always have, always will. In this instance, replaceable batteries generally require bulkier housing. Since we wanted a battery that can be easily replaced, but still wanted to maintain a sleek design, we opted for a 4200 mAh replaceable battery instead of a 5000 mAh non-replaceable one. Would our tech specs be better with a higher capacity battery? For sure! Would Fairphone build a phone that has to be thrown away when the battery dies? Never.

Overall satisfaction from our customers

We make our phones for our users, and their reviews are the ones that matter most to us. After almost half a year with the Fairphone 5, most of them report being happy with the phone overall. 89% of the users who have reviewed the Fairphone 5 with Trustpilot give it 4 stars or better, and many specifically mention being pleased with the battery life.

We may not be top of the premium phone pack when it comes to some technical aspects of battery life, but we’re miles ahead when it comes to phone life, as well as the quality of life of the people who make our phones. Those are the lives that matter most — to all of us in the Fairphone community.

Share this post

Related posts See all posts

  • Here’s how you take contest-winning photographs

    Here’s how you take contest-winning photographs

    We ran a summer-themed photography contest in August, where contestants had to share what summer meant to them through an image. The only condition was the photo had to be clicked on a Fairphone. With hundreds of entries coming in and oodles of camera skills on display from our Fairphone community, it wasn’t easy choosing...

    Read more
  • Have you seen the new Fairphone Timeline feature?

    Have you seen the new Fairphone Timeline feature?

    We can’t wait for you to check out the latest update to the Fairphone app: the Timeline feature. It's now available to all Fairphone 3, 4 and 5 owners, and allows our community to take a look back at their Fairphone journey so far… and peek into the future as well to see what we...

    Read more

Fairphone Newsletter

Want to stay in the loop with all things Fairphone?

Suscríbete a nuestro newsletter para enviarte noticias sobre nuestros proyectos

Suscríbete a nuestra newsletter y recibe 5€ de descuento en tu próximo pedido.

Enviaremos el €5 de descuento al correo electrónico que haz especificado en el momento del registro. El código de descuento puede ser utilizado en tu próxima compra superior a 75€. Por favor ten en cuenta que nuestro principal idioma de comunicación es el Inglés. Al suscribirte, aceptas que la información que nos envías será procesada de acuerdo a nuestra Política de Privacidad y Términos de uso.Te pedimos tu nombre y dirección de correo electrónico para enviarte nuestro newsletter con noticias sobre nuestros proyectos, puedes darte de baja en cualquier momento si así lo deseas.

Close