An SoC from the back pages of the Qualcomm catalog

One of the most interesting parts of the Fairphone 5 is the choice of chipset. Fairphone has previously called out Qualcomm for its rather short support timelines, and with the Fairphone 5, it's doing its best to work around that. Rather than a Qualcomm Snapdragon something-or-other, Fairphone dug through the back pages of the Qualcomm catalog and found the "Qualcomm QCM6490" SoC, which Qualcomm describes as "purpose-built for industrial and commercial IoT applications." Fairphone says it chose this chip specifically because Qualcomm is willing to give it a longer support lifetime than a Snapdragon chip, because Qualcomm wants to give "industrial" gear a longer lifetime (5 years) than "consumer" products.

It doesn't seem like the QCM6490 and Fairphone 5 are missing any major features. It still has Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, sub-6 GHz 5G support, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, and a normal-sounding modem, DSP, ISP, and AI engine. Being "Industrial" doesn't seem to have any clear downside, and the available data just points to this being a re-branded Snapdragon chip without any actual silicon changes. What a loophole!