&gt; That misses the entire point of a modular computing device<p>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&#x27;s really the same sort of modularity for repair as the old Thinkpads. It&#x27;s not supposed to be something like Project Ara.<p>This is why, I saw the other week, Fairphone 2 had been given a 10&#x2F;10 score by iFixit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Teardown&#x2F;Fairphone+2+Teardown&#x2F;52523" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Teardown&#x2F;Fairphone+2+Teardown&#x2F;52523</a><p>And you can see on that page, you can break the phone down into:<p>* Case<p>* Screen<p>* Battery<p>* Main antenna<p>* Headphone jack, earpiece speaker, and front-facing camera module<p>* Rear-facing camera module<p>* Microphone module<p>* Main circuitboard, with extra USB device interface for future extensions.<p>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&#x27;t even have a removable battery.<p>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&#x27;s all a step in the right direction.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.fairphone.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;fp-osos&#x2F;dev&#x2F;fairphone-os-build-instructions.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.fairphone.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;fp-osos&#x2F;dev&#x2F;fairphone-os-...</a>