Two years after the Fairphone 4 and following the release of some audio products like the Fairbuds XL, the Dutch company is back with a new repairable phone: the Fairphone 5. It looks and feels a lot like the Fairphone 4, but it adds choice upgrades across the board, making it the most modular and also most modern-looking repairable phone from the company yet.
The design is largely unchanged compared to the Fairphone 4, but the improvements that the company did make go a long way: The teardrop notch and the LCD screen is finally gone, with an ordinary punch-hole selfie and an OLED taking its place. Otherwise, you’re looking at an aluminum frame, a triangular camera array, and a removable back cover. Here, the company brought back its signature translucent back cover next to two black and blue variants. The dimensions and weight has been reduced ever-so-slightly compared to the predecessor.
Firstly, probably the firmware of the CPU and associated hardware. Then, any specific drivers for ancillary hardware that might be closely integrated with the CPU.
Not even Purism was and to get the Librem 5 entirely closed-source free and it’s probably a lot further along than the Fairphone.
AFAIK, there aren’t any mobile CPUs with microcode like Intel CPUs.
Rockchip RK3399 is the best you can get from my understanding. The newer Rockchip RK3588 requires a non-free blob for the GPU unfortunately.
Sure, I’m not claiming to be an expert here. Similar things to what an RPI4 firmware image is. Whatever that controls.