The Fairphone 6 Plus is the midrange phone we desperately needed

The 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.

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.

Item two: no wireless charging, and likewise no ring of magnets a la Qi2 or MagSafe. I’m growing partial to an easily removable PopSocket on my phone, so I missed having that option here. Moving along: The screen is thoroughly decent, though it doesn’t get quite as bright in daylight as some of the nicest ones out there. The speakers are tinny. And even after more than a week with this phone, I still haven’t learned the muscle memory of finding the wake button / fingerprint scanner without looking, since it sits basically flush with the side of the phone.

The Snapdragon 7S Gen 4 chipset handled the basic demands of modern life. If you poke around the edges you can find where this chipset falls short of the very best SoCs — which you can come by in devices that don’t cost much more than the Fairphone 6 Plus. Google Maps runs a little stuttery on my car’s infotainment screen when I run it with wired Android Auto, and there’s a bit of juddering as I scroll around my town in Pocket City 2. But it handles a dense webpage like Icy Veins’ character build guides remarkably well, and I can get away with a few back-to-back Portrait mode shots before the shutter button grays out to clear the buffer. Outside of very graphically intense gaming, it holds up just fine.

Meeting that bar for a “decent midrange Android phone” means the Fairphone 6 Plus needs to offer a good, basic camera system. It does. It doesn’t offer one iota more than that, but it does the job. It was the camera I used to take pictures of my son’s fifth birthday, which in hindsight was a lot of trust to put into an unproven (by me at least) system. But it worked out! I have an in-focus photo of him blowing out birthday candles. That’s service journalism in action, folks.

The main camera does a fine job with daylight scenes, and the app offers a 2x crop function that I used quite a bit. The ultrawide suffers some noise and smoothing in dimmer indoor light, which is pretty typical. Portrait mode is passable, and I didn’t notice any red flags in the handful of video clips I shot of my kid opening birthday presents. The camera system made some funky choices now and again, but overall I agree with Dom’s impressions of the same camera system on the preceding model: It’s fine. Not great, but certainly passable if you’re not picky.

If that was all the Fairphone had to offer, I’d feel okay about recommending it. But there’s more, starting with the modular back panel accessories. The screwdriver included in the box is all you need to swap out the back plate and replace it with one that has a wallet or a flexible grip. There’s also a crossbody strap you can attach to any of those panels, though the jury’s still out on whether I personally can pull off a crossbody strap. This obviously isn’t as convenient as magnetic attachments, but it’s fun, and fun is hard to come by these days.

The little neon-colored switch on the side of the phone is hard to miss, and it houses another one of the Fairphone’s bonus features. By default, switching it on enables something Fairphone calls “Moments,” which are basically focus modes with minimalist homescreens that limit you to a handful of apps. You can set up your own Moment modes and decide which apps you’ll have access to and who’s allowed to call you when the mode is enabled.

I didn’t use this feature as much as I anticipated, mostly because I’m avoiding social media on my phone at the moment and that’s what I would most need a focus mode to keep me away from. But I think it’s a great concept and the execution appears to be sound. I’d appreciate a little more customizability, like maybe the ability to add a custom wallpaper rather than choosing from the basic options provided. But I guess the more options you add, the more room there is for distractions to wiggle in. Maybe basic really is best.

Fairphone has finally created a phone that feels ready for the mainstream in the 6 and 6 Plus. It’s not just a device that represents some admirable ethical qualities — it’s a very good total package. There’s the feel-good benefit of buying from a company that, by every indication, walks the ethical and sustainability walk. But there are tangible benefits, too, like easily taking care of repairs yourself when you inevitably need them. And those upsides no longer come with such severe tradeoffs. When the price for a midrange phone seems to get higher every day, the 6 Plus starts to look like smart money.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge