GoKawiilThe Fairphone 6 Plus feels like an extremely average midrange Android phone and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
The mission has always been admirable. Fairphone seeks out ethically sourced materials and offers a high degree of repairability for its devices. But the phones themselves required a lot of sacrifices, like putting up with underpowered processors and bad cameras, in order to embrace the sustainability mission. The latest generations of Fairphone have inched toward closing that gap, and the 6 Plus achieves two huge milestones: It feels very much like using a middling Android phone, and it’s actually on sale in the US.
The 6 Plus is a light update to last year’s Fairphone 6, which my colleague Dominic Preston reviewed and found very easy to recommend. The 6 Plus builds on it with a newer midrange Snapdragon chipset and a new color treatment. Fairphone says it’s cobalt; we know it around these parts as blurple. Otherwise, the phone is basically the same, and the replacement parts sold by Fairphone work interchangeably with both models. But above all, this phone is just fine. It runs about as fast as your typical mid-tier Razr or A-series Pixel. It offers a pleasantly close-to-stock version of Android free of bloat or gimmicky AI features. It’s just a phone. And that’s great.
I know, calling this a midrange phone when it’s priced at $649 might feel like a stretch. At best, it’s at the very top of the midrange class. But RAMageddon has done a real number on phone prices over the past year, and it’s not over yet. Given that the phone comes with 12GB of RAM, a five-year warranty, and up to six OS upgrades, that price feels more manageable.
Also, you don’t need to add AppleCare or whatever to that price. You are the AppleCare. The 6 Plus has 12 user-replaceable parts including the battery, screen, USB-C port, and all three cameras. The repairs are extremely beginner-friendly — if you can use the tiny included screwdriver and follow some easy-to-parse directions, you won’t have a problem. The price of these parts compared to the cost of repairing a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phone range from a pretty good deal to a hell of a good deal. Without an extended warranty of some kind, a battery replacement would typically cost in the ballpark of $100 to $180; Fairphone charges $39.99 for a new battery. A screen repair ranges from $100 to nearly $300; a new display from Fairphone costs $89.99. Add in the entirely reasonable cost of 30 minutes of your own labor (if that), and the long-term value of this phone starts looking pretty good.
$649 is also a bargain compared to the $899 that the Fairphone 6 costs in the US. It was only offered preloaded with the privacy-minded /e/OS, which is a de-Googled version of Android made by a company called Murena. It’s not really for the faint of heart, and that price was pretty hard to swallow. But Fairphone is selling the 6 Plus directly in the US, with full support for T-Mobile and AT&T. I’ve had no trouble using it with my Verizon SIM for the past week, though it’s not certified on the network.
More than meets the eye.
Knowing how easy it is to replace parts of this phone as it ages actually required me to think a bit differently while I was using it. Battery life is just okay. I usually got through most days of light-to-moderate use with 60 percent left at bedtime. I did turn on every battery-draining feature I could think of, including the always-on display, higher screen refresh rate, and light mode. Those are all off by default, and probably for good reason. Normally I’d be pretty concerned about what that battery performance would look like in a few years.
But there’s an easy fix: Just swap the battery yourself. No trip to the repair shop, no time away from your phone. Most phones would benefit from a new battery after a few years of continuous use anyway; at least with this one you can do it yourself and pay a lot less.
The 6 Plus comes with way fewer compromises than early versions of the Fairphone did. The first iterations came with outdated designs, poor-quality cameras, and previous-gen displays. Things have steadily improved, but there are still some tradeoffs hanging around. The phone is rated IP55, which equates to mostly dust-resistant and mostly water-resistant, but not fully protected. Sealing up the phone completely and still offering easy repairability would be difficult, maybe impossible. That’s bad news, item one.
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