The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled."
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.
I think it's absolutely pettiness at this point, on both sides. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a post about /e/OS on Mastodon with someone in the replies ranting about how everyone should use Graphene instead. It reminds me of the old joke about vegans.
GrapheneOS and /e/OS' goals are different - the former is about security tightening and the latter is about deGoogling. They just had a public falling out and refuse to let it go.
I was not aware of Murena forwarding data to OpenAI. I'm sympathetic to Murena and their partnership with e/OS/. I looked up what it is about. /e/OS 3 uses OpenAI for Voice to Text. This is the statement where they explain this:
> To implement this approach, we chose to use the OpenAI gpt-4 transcribe API that has been designed for this purpose, is cost-effective and efficient.
In the current version of /e/OS, Voice to Text runs offline.
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service [...] The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service through an anonymising proxy, so it required a Murena Workspace Premium subscription and an internet connection.
> The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.
Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.
You need to transfer more than 480Mbps over a hard line to and from your phone? Seems like a niche requirement that even iPhone 17 doesn't bother with. Or is it psychological 'nunber must go up and usb number went from 2 to 3 many years ago so now 2 bad'
Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.
I have a fairphone 5 and actively don't like it when it asks me if I want to mirror my screen when I plug it into a charging cable attached to a monitor.
How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder!
I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways
You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first.
There are only 264 replies in that forum total, and not every reply is a unique individual.
I would say that it’s easy to make an argument that this is quite an insignificant number of users even for a niche smartphone manufacturer. I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop. I would be surprised if the percent of smartphone users who do that eclipsed 0.5%.
My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I tried that way back when Windows phone was a thing (using my phone as a desktop), I even had a small dock for my Lumia 925. It worked well enough for presentations and RDPing into my workstation.
When we are travelling, we often hook up our phones to a hotel/apartment TV with a DP-Alt to HDMI adapter to use our own streaming services/apps. A phone without DP-Alt would be a no-go.
Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.
Praying that fairphone somehow makes a foldable one day. My next phone will probably be a fold 8 because I really want a nice reading experience on the go, but I love the philosophy and love my framework laptop.
I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.
Unfortunately, there were quite a lot early reports of users whose FP6 volume buttons broke or their logic boards during charging. Both are components that are not user-replaceable and it often takes Fairphone 4-6 weeks to repair them. Similarly, the head band on their FairBuds XL regularly break for a bunch of people (user replaceable, but you still have to go through their slow support if you do not want to pay for the replacement yourself).
Fairphone (in contrast to Apple) are also known for introducing really bad bugs and then not fixing them for months. Like how the FP4 could only keep a single app in memory after they introduced a memory management bug or how currently a lot of FP6 users are affected by a bug where WiFi stops working (due to an IPv6-related bug) that has been reported in March.
Then there are the really weird design decisions on the FP6. Like, they put the fingerprint scanner in the power button, which makes it nearly impossible to use it one-handed with your left hand if you actually want to unlock it or use fingerprint unlock in an application. And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
And then we haven't talked about the hardware. The speakers are pretty mediocre. The camera is only mid. The SoC even caused render slowdowns in 2026 in /e/OS, it's going to be wholly underpowered after 7 years (the new CPU in the plus is barely going to help, the 7s Gen 4 is the Gen 3 with slightly higher clocked cores).
I had the Fairphone 6 and I am happy that I was able to get rid of it for still a fairly OK price (I got it because I like their mission).
> And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
To be fair, Apple has nearly the same design.
> I got it because I like their mission
Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.
I mean replacing a battery is something you do, at most, once every 5-7 years. If removing the battery requires a heat gun then it's not the worst thing imo.
> Critical Notice: The device does not support LTE Band 13 (Verizon's primary coverage frequency).
Presumably that frequency isn't used in Europe? It also says that it's "not certified for use on the Verizon Wireless network." I don't know if that means Verizon might block it (which sounds like a very US thing) or it's related to not supporting the frequency that Verizon uses for LTE.
Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m seriously thinking about switching to AT&T over this, but I would need to know if the frequencies are covered as good on AT&T.
I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
> I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
The beginning of your sentence - "I can’t believe how few choices we have..." - can be applied equally sadly to other areas here in the U.S....such as but not limited to lack of choice of residential ISPs, or lack of choice (or generally mis-incentivized) healthcare providers, or lack of choice of mobile service providers, or, etc., or etc. And, of course, your last part of your comment asking where the innovation is? Well, innovation often is pocketed in those who control the capital, and only released little by little at the whims of releasing more capital. Sorry, i have to step away, cuz felt sad instantly just citing my own comments here. :-(
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
AI-like typing detected.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
how do people copy edit this and not notice?
If they wanted to pay trained copy editors, they wouldn't use A.I.
>how do people copy edit this and not notice?
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.
$0.10 for a marketing blurb isn’t exactly throwing away tokens, and if it conforms to society’s expectations then probably worth the spend.
Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled."
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features:
> Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us.
I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.
Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.
I think it's absolutely pettiness at this point, on both sides. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a post about /e/OS on Mastodon with someone in the replies ranting about how everyone should use Graphene instead. It reminds me of the old joke about vegans.
GrapheneOS and /e/OS' goals are different - the former is about security tightening and the latter is about deGoogling. They just had a public falling out and refuse to let it go.
Only for one voice to text feature which is completely optional to use and can be replaced with something else.
As another commenter mentioned, this voice to text feature is now an offline feature and no longer sends data outside the device.
As another note, this Fairphone can be purchased without /e/OS at all. It’s now being sold in the US without Murena being involved at all.
I was not aware of Murena forwarding data to OpenAI. I'm sympathetic to Murena and their partnership with e/OS/. I looked up what it is about. /e/OS 3 uses OpenAI for Voice to Text. This is the statement where they explain this:
> To implement this approach, we chose to use the OpenAI gpt-4 transcribe API that has been designed for this purpose, is cost-effective and efficient.
https://community.e.foundation/t/clarification-about-voice-t...
On my /e/OS phone, I've installed Whisper+ voice input and disabled 'Murena Voice to Text'. I never use this features.
In the current version of /e/OS, Voice to Text runs offline.
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service [...] The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text
> Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.
How? In what way? Source?
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using...
June 2025
Someone else shared the up to date info about this feature: https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service through an anonymising proxy, so it required a Murena Workspace Premium subscription and an internet connection.
> The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
That does not seem like pettiness to me. That seems like a very good reason to not work with someone.
Here's a post with more specific allegations:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.
i dont get it, they are comparing eOS to graphene, not talking about the hardware.
this would be like grapheneOS not using pixel because the stock android that ships with it does not respect privacy.
am i missing something?
Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.
The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…
To which device are you referring?
The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs.
https://us.fairphone.com/carrier-compatibility
Exciting to see this soon after someone got the Fairphone 6 camera working on postmarketOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285
The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.
They even mention that they want to move on to work on the Fairphone 6+.
Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone.
I bought a Fairphone 4 from Murena years ago (and am still using it), and I bought a pair of Fairbuds XL just in April from the same.
This is still a big deal and seems to come with more expanded carrier support.
USB 2.0 port is the only thing preventing me from purchasing one. A wild choice since I believe previous versions did not have this limitation.
I wonder what their reasoning behind the downgrade is. I own a FP4 and even this model features USB 3.0 with DisplayPort support.
You need to transfer more than 480Mbps over a hard line to and from your phone? Seems like a niche requirement that even iPhone 17 doesn't bother with. Or is it psychological 'nunber must go up and usb number went from 2 to 3 many years ago so now 2 bad'
Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.
I have a fairphone 5 and actively don't like it when it asks me if I want to mirror my screen when I plug it into a charging cable attached to a monitor.
That's an issue that would be solved with a better UX on Fairphone's side though, not removing the feature entirely.
Even my lgv20 could do an external display.
How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder!
I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways
You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
There are only 264 replies in that forum total, and not every reply is a unique individual.
I would say that it’s easy to make an argument that this is quite an insignificant number of users even for a niche smartphone manufacturer. I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop. I would be surprised if the percent of smartphone users who do that eclipsed 0.5%.
My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I tried that way back when Windows phone was a thing (using my phone as a desktop), I even had a small dock for my Lumia 925. It worked well enough for presentations and RDPing into my workstation.
When we are travelling, we often hook up our phones to a hotel/apartment TV with a DP-Alt to HDMI adapter to use our own streaming services/apps. A phone without DP-Alt would be a no-go.
Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.
that said, Fairphones habe a micro SD card slot which you can use for such things
Yes, and I'd prefer to not have to take it out all the time. Especially since taking out the SD card means also taking out the SIM card.
Having to remove your SIM card (since it uses the same tray) and potentially switch off your phone to transfer files at a decent speed is meh.
Praying that fairphone somehow makes a foldable one day. My next phone will probably be a fold 8 because I really want a nice reading experience on the go, but I love the philosophy and love my framework laptop.
That website took a very very long time to load.
$650 for anyone who does not want to click. Hard sell compared to the iPhone 17e but more choice is good.
I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.
Unfortunately, there were quite a lot early reports of users whose FP6 volume buttons broke or their logic boards during charging. Both are components that are not user-replaceable and it often takes Fairphone 4-6 weeks to repair them. Similarly, the head band on their FairBuds XL regularly break for a bunch of people (user replaceable, but you still have to go through their slow support if you do not want to pay for the replacement yourself).
Fairphone (in contrast to Apple) are also known for introducing really bad bugs and then not fixing them for months. Like how the FP4 could only keep a single app in memory after they introduced a memory management bug or how currently a lot of FP6 users are affected by a bug where WiFi stops working (due to an IPv6-related bug) that has been reported in March.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/dns-over-tls-ipv6-issues-apps-...
Then there are the really weird design decisions on the FP6. Like, they put the fingerprint scanner in the power button, which makes it nearly impossible to use it one-handed with your left hand if you actually want to unlock it or use fingerprint unlock in an application. And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
And then we haven't talked about the hardware. The speakers are pretty mediocre. The camera is only mid. The SoC even caused render slowdowns in 2026 in /e/OS, it's going to be wholly underpowered after 7 years (the new CPU in the plus is barely going to help, the 7s Gen 4 is the Gen 3 with slightly higher clocked cores).
I had the Fairphone 6 and I am happy that I was able to get rid of it for still a fairly OK price (I got it because I like their mission).
> And they put the power button on the exact opposite side of the volume down button, so you make a screenshot when you want to lock the phone half of the time.
To be fair, Apple has nearly the same design.
> I got it because I like their mission
Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.
I’d pay twice what they are asking for one with a reasonably sized screen.
I’m holding on to my iphone mini, but apparently people buy the razr and just leave it closed 100% of the time.
That’s $700, and not having the dumb hinge mechanism and internal facing display would be a selling point for many.
I mean replacing a battery is something you do, at most, once every 5-7 years. If removing the battery requires a heat gun then it's not the worst thing imo.
You can also carry one or two spare batteries with you and get from zero to 100% charge in a minute.
Wondering if fairphone will ever be officially available in india. I would like a no bloatware and repairable device.
Inb4 people complaining that Fairphones are overpriced lmao
No Verizon support. :(
How is that still a thing? I can’t think of a phone here in Europe that you can’t just put a SIM card from any carrier in and it will work.
From Fairphone's US order page
> Critical Notice: The device does not support LTE Band 13 (Verizon's primary coverage frequency).
Presumably that frequency isn't used in Europe? It also says that it's "not certified for use on the Verizon Wireless network." I don't know if that means Verizon might block it (which sounds like a very US thing) or it's related to not supporting the frequency that Verizon uses for LTE.
Because the United States sucks in regards to mobile phone compatibility and spectrum allocation. https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ
What is that link?
Interesting, the tech specs page said Verizon was supported but the carrier coverage page says it isn’t
Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m seriously thinking about switching to AT&T over this, but I would need to know if the frequencies are covered as good on AT&T.
I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
> I can’t believe how few choices we have in cell phones in the United States. Where is all the innovation I keep hearing everyone talk about?
The beginning of your sentence - "I can’t believe how few choices we have..." - can be applied equally sadly to other areas here in the U.S....such as but not limited to lack of choice of residential ISPs, or lack of choice (or generally mis-incentivized) healthcare providers, or lack of choice of mobile service providers, or, etc., or etc. And, of course, your last part of your comment asking where the innovation is? Well, innovation often is pocketed in those who control the capital, and only released little by little at the whims of releasing more capital. Sorry, i have to step away, cuz felt sad instantly just citing my own comments here. :-(
Innovation in the US is mainly how many more creative ways they can suck money out of consumers.