Buying a Fairphone in the US used to come with a catch: you had to track down a third-party retailer and just hope the phone would actually work properly on your carrier's network. That awkward buying process is now over with the launch of the Fairphone Gen. 6+ — the first phone in the Dutch brand's decade-plus history to be officially sold in the US.
The Gen. 6+ follows up on last year's Fairphone 6, with several clear upgrades: a Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and, for the first time, 12GB of DDR5 RAM. It sports a 6.3-inch OLED display with 120Hz dynamic refresh rate, 256GB of built-in storage, and a microSD card slot for expansion. The main camera uses a 50-megapixel Sony Lytia 700C sensor. Fairphone also developed a brand-new photo gallery app for this generation, which the company says addresses a long-standing user request. For a mid-range phone priced at $650 (£569 in the UK), that's a pretty solid spec sheet.
Sustainability and repairability have always been core to the Fairphone brand, and the Gen. 6+ keeps that going: over 50% of the phone's weight comes from fair-trade or recycled materials. The company says this is the lowest-carbon-footprint Fairphone to date, at about 30 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per unit, and claims it's currently the only smartphone on the US market to achieve "e-waste neutral" status. The previous model scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale, and when it comes to spare parts availability and ease of disassembly, the Gen. 6+ isn't expected to backslide.
The new cobalt blue colorway, according to the company, is meant to reflect its commitment to responsible mineral sourcing — 14 of the minerals and materials used in the phone are certified through organizations like the Fair Cobalt Alliance and the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.
More than the specs, what's really changing the buying experience is availability. The Gen. 6+ ships with clean Android 16 and comes with a promised 7+ years of software updates. You can buy it directly from Fairphone's website or Amazon.com . It hasn't been certified by Verizon yet, but the phone is unlocked and explicitly supports T-Mobile and AT&T, so there's no more guesswork involved. The Fairphone Gen. 6+ is available now.
Separately, Fairphone has also teased its second-generation repairable wireless earbuds, the Fairbuds 2, slated for release in Q4 this year. Details are still scarce, but Engadget reports that notable improvements are expected, including longer battery life and better sound quality.
