> That misses the entire point of a modular computing device The point with Fairphone is repairability - their purpose is to lower impact on the environment, a

> That misses the entire point of a modular computing device The point with Fairphone is repairability - their purpose is to lower impact on the environment, and improve the social outcome of the trade along the supply chain. It's really the same sort of modularity for repair as the old Thinkpads. It's not supposed to be something like Project Ara. This is why, I saw the other week, Fairphone 2 had been given a 10/10 score by iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523 And you can see on that page, you can break the phone down into: * Case * Screen * Battery * Main antenna * Headphone jack, earpiece speaker, and front-facing camera module * Rear-facing camera module * Microphone module * Main circuitboard, with extra USB device interface for future extensions. It may be that calling it the first modular smartphone is taking it too far, it depends really on what you mean by the word. Although I doubt there had been a phone like this before, designed to be taken apart and reconstructed. These days most phones don't even have a removable battery. Edit: FWIW, I think this also has benefits for software. Given the difficulties of phone hardware, if you can keep the phone going for longer, it makes a more stable base for ROM development. They also make it easy to root the device (and I think that will not void the warranty), and provide the code and instructions to build and flash their AOSP-derived OS in its entirety. They still have binary blobs unfortunately (you can read their various struggles with hardware supplier around this on their blog), but it's all a step in the right direction. http://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/dev/fairphone-os-build-instructions.html http://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/dev/fairphone-os-...