Which phone has the longest warranty?

One of the key reasons we love the Fairphone 5 is its impressive warranty offering. Fairphone is a company whose primary purpose is to ensure that the products it sells can last as long as possible, in an effort to minimise e-waste, as well as wider environmental impact, and an extended warranty certainly supports this endeavour.

As per EU law, Fairphone has to sell its wares with a minimum two-year warranty. However, the company then offers up its latest Fairphone 5 (and the Fairphone 4, for that matter) with the option an an extended three-year warranty on top; meaning your Fairphone can be covered for up to five years total.

Even if you don’t buy your Fairphone directly from the company, they promise to still offer this extended warranty, provided you activate it within 90 days of the device’s purchase date. This carries through to 2025 too, meaning you could technically buy a Fairphone 5 with a warranty that doesn’t expire until 2031.

At the time of writing, the company hasn’t yet brought its latest Fairphone 5 to the US, but previous models have made it across the Atlantic, so if it does, we hope that it’ll come packing the same impressive warranty offering the company serves it up with in Europe and the UK.

Unlike Fairphone’s extended warranty offering, the rest of the warranties mentioned here all run the statutory length required in a given region. In the case of Samsung’s current top dog – the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – (along with the rest of the company’s current smartphone lineup) the company offers a 24-month warranty in the UK/EU and a 12-month standard limited warranty in the US.

Samsung’s warranty terms cover defects in materials and workmanship but don’t cover consumables (like the battery). If you want added cover, the company does sell extended warranties, the pricing for which varies based on your device.

Similarly to Apple Care+, Samsung Care+ is an optional insurance policy (different from an extended warranty) that allows for up to two claims per year and covers accidental damage and theft; depending on which plan you choose.

As for the S24 Ultra itself, despite being one of the first big flagships of 2024, several months on it remains one of the most formidable. With a refined design – newly strengthened by titanium and offering improved ergonomics, a revised and more versatile camera setup, and our first taste of the company’s Galaxy AI smarts, this latest Ultra remains the year’s best Android phone to date.

Running concurrently to the two-year statutory warranty term in the UK and the ‘implied warranty of merchantability’ – whose duration varies by product and state in the US – Apple offers its own one-year limited warranty (check out Apple’s UK warranty details and Apple’s US warranty details, as required) on select products; including iPhones.

You might know this warranty better as AppleCare, which differs from AppleCare+, an optional form of insurance against additional maladies, such as accidental damage and theft.

Assuming you’re comfortable with the terms of Apple’s warranty offerings, the products it covers are among the best in the business; the latest iPhone 15 Pro chief among them. Provided you don’t need the super-sized screen of the iPhone 15 Pro Max or its 5x telephoto camera, the standard iPhone 15 Pro serves up what is arguably the best iPhone experience overall, right now; squeezing impressive performance into a comparatively small package.

So long as you can swing the high asking price, the 15 Pro also benefits from noteworthy upgrades in both performance – thanks to the company’s latest A17 Pro chipset, and convenience, with the move (finally) away from Lightning to USB-C.

Thankfully, Google – like Samsung – offers up its latest Pixels with a 24-month warranty in the UK and 12-months cover in the US.

For added peace of mind, you can also pick up what it calls Preferred Care (if activated within 90 days of the original device purchase), which covers repair and replacement on select Pixel phones (and other Google hardware), including its current best and brightest: the Pixel 9 Pro XL.

The phone itself is the current top tier offering from Google, with much being made of the Gemini-AI integration that is one of the main selling points of the device. The voice interface can interact with various Google apps to organise your life and answer your questions.

The hardware is also impressive, with a new design making it instantly recognisable (thanks in large part to the camera bump on the rear), plus there are the usual fantastic Pixel cameras onboard.

Motorola’s limited warranty covers its entire lineup for 12 months in the US and every smartphone sold in the UK on or after 1 March 2017 comes with 24-months cover in the UK.

That, naturally includes the company’s most recent flagship phone series, topped by the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra. Like Apple, Samsung and Google, MotoCare (UK) and MotoCare (US), serve as additional insurance that extends coverage beyond the terms of the company’s limited warranty.

Motorola is among one of the largest singular phone brands in both the US and UK, and its Edge series demands a not-insignificant amount of influence. To capitalise on this, the latest Edge 50 Ultra delivers one of the most elegant designs we’ve yet seen from the company, containing a capable camera system and other perks that place it above other entries in this list, like fast charging.

The characteristically clean Motorola software experience does have a little more bloat than we’d like and performance from its Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset isn’t up there with the likes of the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but it otherwise remains a competent all-rounder.