“Ethical” Fairphone 2 Beats Google’s Ara for World’s First Modular Phone

SP's: A Dutch startup is ready to launch first ever consumer-ready modular smartphones in December in select European countries beating Google’s Project Ara for world’s first modular smartphones. Since Google announced a delay in its Project Ara, Fairphone took a lead in launching its “ethically sourced” Fairphone 2 modular smartphone.

Google created quite a buzz with its Project Ara modular phones at the start of the year but got beaten up in the race of creating the first one. Dutch-based startup Fairphone is all set to bring out the first ever consumer ready modular smartphones in the market.

For all those hard-liners who are confused what extra does the smartphone could have, since they have already started flying as well, the modular smartphones will prove beyond your imagination. The conventional smartphones are limited to their software flexibility, but the modular smartphones will give you a control over the hardware adaptability as well.

So, that means if you are fed up with your old camera, you can replace it with a new high power camera module, if your phone is slow, you can just replace the processor – as simple as that. Read Smartphone of the future for more information.

Since Google announced a delay in its Project Ara, Fairphone took a lead in launching its “ethically sourced” Fairphone 2 modular smartphone. Ethically sourced means that all the products and materials used while making the smartphone were collected from conflict-free zones.

The Fairphone 2 modular phone has 7 assembly components which means, you can replace seven of the components from your Fairphone 2. Namely battery, display, main chassis, back cover, receiver, speaker and rear camera modules.

The phone will be powered Snapdragon 801 SoC and use Android 5.1 Lollipop, but can also run other OS as well like Canonical’s Ubuntu, Jolla’s Sailfish OS, and Mozilla’s Firefox OS.

The first hand Fairphone 2 set will have 8MP rear camera, 5-inch full HD LCD display with Gorilla Glass, 2 GB RAM and supports dual micro SIM.

The first modular smartphone is priced at $580 and will arrive in select European countries in December 2015. It will be rolled out for other countries by early 2016.