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.
