Tired of upgrading your phone? This sustainable Android lets you do your own repairs
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Tired of upgrading your phone? This sustainable Android lets you do your own repairs
The Fairphone (Gen. 6) has a modular design that lets you handle repairs and replacements yourself. The company uses ethically sourced materials, pays fair wages to its workers around the world, and has an unusually low carbon footprint. The price is a little more than other budget or middle-of-the-pack Androids, but you’re paying more for the sustainability (that might save you money in the long run).” You can preorder the Fairphone 6 now for $900 with shipping in August. It’s available in three colors — black, white, and forest green.
The Fairphone (Gen. 6) is here, and while it might appear at first glance to be a generic, midrange Android phone, its design is something unique.
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Like the Fairphone (Gen. 5) that debuted in 2023, the latest Fairphone is focused on sustainability. The company uses ethically sourced materials, pays fair wages to its workers around the world, and has an unusually low carbon footprint. (This particular phone has one of the lowest in the market, the company says.) The handset itself can last a long time.
The Fairphone (Gen. 6) has a modular design that lets you handle repairs and replacements yourself. In theory, this means you could keep your phone much longer than a traditional phone, swapping out parts as upgrades become available. That’s hinted at in the actual name of the device. The idea is to move away from a new generation of phone each year, so this is just a Fairphone with the generation in parentheses.
The latest version doesn’t have a rating yet, but the previous one scored a 10/10 from iFixIt, meaning it has well above average access to reasonably priced critical parts and that those parts are easy to replace on your own. From reports on the Gen. 5 phone, many components can be switched out with just a few screws.
How the Fairphone (Gen. 6) stacks up
The specs of this phone are right at what you’d expect from a midrange phone. It runs on the /e/OS, an open-sourced mobile operating system based on Android (so it’s compatible with most Android apps).
It runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, has a 6.31-inch P-OLED Corning Gorilla Glass 7i screen, holds a 4415mAh battery, and comes with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. It has a three-lens camera setup: 50MP main, 13MP secondary rear, and 32MP selfie camera.
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The price is a little more than other budget or middle-of-the-pack Androids, but you’re paying more for the sustainability (that might save you money in the long run). You can preorder the Fairphone 6 now for $900 with shipping in August. It’s available in three colors — black, white, and forest green.
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