THE INTERNET OF THINGS

European phone maker Fairphone has used an industrial chip from Qualcomm to give its latest repairable 5G hardware the same decade of support as the software.

The Fairphone 5, released this week for pre-orders, is based around the QCM6490 eight core IoT chipset rather than a SnapDragon mobile phone chip. There are ten replaceable and repairable modules, from the 90MHz OLED screen and 4200mAh battery to the Sony camera modules, dual SIM holder and the micro SD card holder. It comes with 8GB RAM, 256GB internal storage that is expandable up to 2TB, and a clean version of Android 13.

The chipset is designed for industrial grade tablets with a longer lifetime with software support for the next five updates until 2028. After that, Fairphone commits to extend support until 2031 and is aiming for 2033, giving a total of eight to ten years of software support.