Fairphone 5 review

90Hz OLED display

The Fairphone 5 is equipped with a bigger 6.46-inch display this time around and with a higher resolution to match - 1224 x 2700px. It now has an OLED instead of LCD, but the refresh rate is modest - just 90Hz when the industry has moved to 120Hz for a while now. There are no HDR certifications either.

Brightness control is pretty solid, though, as the display reacts fast to changes in the environment, and you can also let the software adjust the right color temperature depending on the ambient lighting too.

Speaking of brightness, the Fairphone 5 got up to 576 nits in manual mode, while in auto, the panel peaked at 772 nits, which is pretty close to the advertised 800 nits of typical brightness. Although not chart-topping, this is enough for comfortable outdoor use even on the sunniest of days.

The default color mode offers punchy colors, but the whites and grays are quite blue-ish, so opting for the natural color preset is preferable if you want accurate color reproduction. The average dE2000 in this mode is just 2.0 - an excellent result with some small deviation for whites and grays again.

Battery life

A 4,200 mAh battery powers up the Fairphone 5, and unlike the rest of the smartphones, the cell is user-replaceable on the fly. You just need to remove the back cover first. And we hope this will be enough to persuade potential buyers because battery life is downright disappointing. An overall score of 88 hours just isn't enough to compete with the rest of the handsets in the same price category, especially considering the fact that most of them run on more powerful chipsets too.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

While standby and call runtimes are dependable, the screen-on tests are where the Fairphone 5 fails to impress. We expected more, even for a 4,200 mAh battery.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

Even though Fairphone doesn't explicitly state that the handset supports PowerDelivery protocol, we confirmed that it uses a standard 30W PowerDelivery charger. However, apart from a couple of phones, such as the Galaxy S series or the Pixel 7 series, the Fairphone 5 is dragging behind the competition in terms of charging.

Surely, it's not slow per se, but it's below the industry's standard for the price range.

Speakers

The Fairphone 5 comes with a hybrid stereo speaker setup - a dedicated loudspeaker at the bottom and one that doubles as an earpiece at the top. Of course, balance could be better as the bottom speaker is noticeably louder than the other. However, overall loudness is our main issue with the setup. An overall score of -31 LUFS is far from ideal for a phone in this price range.

Audio quality isn't impressive either. Music sounds rather flat, although there's minimal distortion at higher volume levels. Then again, the speakers are far from loud in the first place.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.