// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
The Fairphone (Gen 6+) Review: Finally in the US
%20SOURCE%20Julian%20Chokkattu(2).jpg)
The US has long had fewer smartphone options than the rest of the world. The Apple-and-Samsung duopoly, supported largely by carriers—where people buy most smartphones—has made it hard for other phone brands to break through. It’s partly why the Dutch manufacturer Fairphone hasn’t sold its repairable, ethically made smartphone in the US in its 13-year existence—until now.
Fairphone finally made it across the pond with a new model, the Fairphone (Gen. 6+). If you’ve complained about the lack of repairable smartphones, the inability to self-replace a battery, or even the idea of a more ethically manufactured phone, the Fairphone should be on your list (if it’s time to upgrade).
I’ve been using this $650 Android handset for several weeks, and it’s pretty good.
There isn’t much of a difference between the Fairphone (Gen. 6) I reviewed last year and the (Gen. 6+). The phone comes in a new cobalt blue color to commemorate people who work in the cobalt mines (a crucial component in smartphones) and the Fair Cobalt Alliance, a nonprofit cofounded by Fairphone.
Chiefly, the Fairphone has a slightly more souped-up processor—the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4—alongside 12 GB of RAM. That last part is important, as many of the new software features in our smartphones, specifically those powered by artificial intelligence, demand a lot of memory; the 12 gigs here should give the Fairphone a longer shelf life in being able to take advantage of those capabilities.
Performance has been plenty satisfactory, whether I was using Google Maps to navigate, doomscrolling through Instagram Reels, or playing Pokémon Go while waiting for a doctor’s appointment. My benchmarks show the tiniest of performance bumps over the processor in the Gen 6. You may see a slight stutter here and there, but it barely affects day-to-day use. The software is also more polished this time around; I haven’t run into notable bugs, which I can’t say for last year’s model.
I don’t mind the look of the new Fairphone—the blue and the yellow-accented button is a fun combo—but it does have a very plasticky feel. You might like Fairphone’s accessory system, which lets you replace part of the backplate with accessories like a wallet or phone grip by removing two screws (you can use the included screwdriver). I haven’t bothered, as it feels a little clunky; I don’t want these items permanently on the back, and unscrewing them is a hassle. Hopefully, Fairphone can move to a MagSafe-like system in the future.
The 6.3-inch AMOLED, 120-Hz screen is more than adequate. It’s colorful, sharp, and bright enough to read in sunlight. Fairphone’s adaptive brightness mode can be a little aggressive, so I often manually adjusted the brightness slider, but I don’t have much else to complain about.
Battery life from the 4,415-mAh cell isn’t impressive, but it won’t have you running to a wall outlet all the time either. I typically ended most days with around 20 percent by bedtime; that’s with around five to six hours of screen-on time. It’s a shame there’s no wireless charging, but that’s a nice-to-have, not necessarily a deal-breaker. Oddly, the phone doesn’t come with a USB-C cable (the lack of a charging block is standard across phones these days), but the idea is that you probably have one lying around in a drawer. Less e-waste!
The dual-camera system, powered by a 50-MP main and a 13-MP ultrawide, is solid. No, Fairphone can’t really compete with the big tech giants like Google, Apple, and Samsung on this front. Low-light scenes suffer the most, with details lost in shadows—stay very still to avoid a blurry image. Photos from the 32-MP selfie camera can also look a little soft. Still, it’s not so poor that you won’t use it. You’ll get perfectly adequate results, but if you rely heavily on your smartphone’s camera for video and photos, you may want to look elsewhere.