The Fairphone 6 no longer feels like a compromise (except in the US)

Fairphone 6 arrives almost two years after the 5th, a testimony of the company’s approach on the upgrade cycle. If anything, I suspect that the company would be frustrated if the owners of Fairphone 5 already envisaged a new model – these are phones to keep, repair and keep until the end bitter.

The most recent Fairphone continues the company’s commitment to user repairability, long -term customer support and ethical production. This means compromise for the consumer: you will find more powerful phones with prettier screens and more competent cameras for less money. But this year, these compromises are smaller and easier than ever, while the phone remains much better for the planet – you can’t say more fair than that.

Fairphone 6 is now available through the United Kingdom and Europe. It costs € 599 /499 for a version running the personalized Android software from Fairphone, which is quite close to the experience in stock, or £ 50 / £ 50 more in progress / E / OS, a version without confidentiality and without Android manufactured by Murena. If you are in the United States, it is the only Model available, and you will have to buy it directly from Murena for $ 899, a price that the founder and CEO of Murena, Gaël Duval, told me to reflect prices on American imports. It is a substantial price difference which means that the Fairphone 6 is in competition with midrangers like the Pixel 9a in Europe with flagship products such as Pixel 10 or the iPhone 16 in the United States, which makes it much more difficult to justify.

I tested the confidentiality / E / OS phone version of the phone. It may not seem to be a million kilometers from Android origin, but the ready -to -use experience is very different. It has quick access to options to block the monitoring of cookies in applications, simulate your geolocation information or hide your IP address, as well as a “shame wall” listing your applications by the number of times they try to follow your activity. Murena describes it as “dis-googled”, which means that it is built on the open source Android project, but does not require a Google account to use, does not include any default Google application and should not share any of your data with Google.

If you are ready to engage in life without Google, there is a relatively simple stock software table, such as the calendar and card applications that seem to have been lifted a decade ago. An App Store store is by default open-source options, giving each application a confidentiality score with details on the trackers they use and the authorizations it needs.

The App Store also allows you to install almost any Android application – even those Google – but only if you wish. It is thanks to Microg, an open source alternative to Google Play services. The only warnings are that Google Wallet will not work for NFC payments, and that some applications are a bit… Janky. Most seem to work, but MyfitnessPal will not work, and a few others tend to stutter and crash.

On the material side, the Fairphone 6 is smaller and lighter than the 5, with a brighter and smoother 6.31 inch 120 Hz screen. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 chipset is not flagship equipment, but it is smooth most of the time, and with 8 GB of RAM, it is fairly powerful for anything except a serious game. The 4,415mAh battery lasts more than a day, and the 30W cable charging speed is GOOD But not impressive, without wireless option.

The cameras remain a large demotion compared to the competition. The 50 megapixel main lens and the 13 megapixel ultrairs are good for the basics – and have exceeded my expectations from time to time – but they fight in darkness, in complex lighting or with rapidly evolution subjects. If you just need your camera sufficient Then this is certainly the case, but you can get much better cameras for the same money (or less) elsewhere.

The other big addition to the Fairphone 6 is a range of semi-modular accessories, similar to those offered with Nothing’s’s CMF Phone 2 Pro. There is a strap, a card holder and a loop handle, but the smart thing is that the three can be seen at the back of the phone, part of the parts of the equipment. I hope other options are coming.

More importantly is the capacity of the phone to last for years. Whether you buy from Fairphone or Murena, you will get a five -year prolonged warranty. Fairphone is also committed to eight years of software updates and seven updates of the Android version, although Murrena only promises five years of software support for its version – Worse than Apple, Google and Samsung.

The phone is made from fairly robust plastic, with Corning Gorilla Glass 7i on the display, and feels hard. However, there is a big drawback of sustainability: it has only an IP55 note for the protection of dust and water – good, but not brilliant – which is the drawback of a reparable design which exchange glue for less waterproof screws. Thus, although the Fairphone 6 is more reparable than other alternatives, there is a slightly higher risk of requiring this repair in the first place, at least with regard to sand and water.

Speaking of: You only need a single Torx T5 screwdriver to strip the phone to parts, which connect and disconnect with a simple push, by clicking on site. You can replace the battery, the display, the rear lid, each camera lens, the speaker, the earphone, the USB-C port and the SIM tray (which doubles like a microSD location for stretch storage). The spare parts are sold by Fairphone and Ifixit, with a promise to store them for years. In the United States, Murena should Store them, but when writing the editorial time, the documents are not yet on its site.

I wanted to confirm if any Idi could make a repair, so I dismantled each piece of the phone that I could and put it back together, which took a little more than an hour and left me a perfectly functional phone on the other side. Fairphone has good YouTube videos to perform a given repair step by step, and that could not be much easier, as long as you are careful to screw everything in the right order (AHEM, not an error that I would never make …).

The song “Just” of the name also applies to production. Fairphone claims to use as many recycled materials as possible and work with mines, recycles, component factories and mounting chains with fair working conditions, decent salary for workers’ representation. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but Fairphone claims to approach as much as possible.

I was prudent to recommend previous fairphones. The elevator land is excellent, but paying a bonus for under-effective equipment is always a difficult sale. But pure power is not the differentiation factor that it was in the past, so even if the Fairphone 6 East Less powerful than his counterparts, he is always powerful enough for most of us. However, improvements in the management of software and sustainability of other manufacturers have made the offer of Fairphone less unique – although no one offers repairability like this.

Against mid -range alternatives, such as the price in Europe, the Fairphone is holding up. There are small compromises, but there is still a just choice for almost anyone. In the United States, where it costs more than certain flagship products and is delivered with the desooged / bone, whether you like it, it is only for those who are really attached to the cause.

Photograph by Dominic Preston / The Verge