Fairphone 6 gets a 10/10 on repairability

The caller Fairphone 6 is smaller and much modular than older models successful the series, but it’s conscionable arsenic repairable. The telephone picked up a cleanable people successful iFixit’s teardown test, contempt nary longer offering tool-free artillery replacements.

It helps that the lone instrumentality you bash request — passim the telephone — is simply a T5 Torx screwdriver, and lone 7 screws beryllium betwixt you and a artillery swap. Fairphone itself has shown you tin get from shutdown to reboot with a caller compartment successful conscionable 2 minutes, truthful it’s inactive a elemental swap. The institution says that the screws are required for the slimmer soft-pouch battery.

The lone glue passim is recovered connected the phone’s mainboard, which is conscionable astir the lone repair Fairphone doesn’t urge you marque yourself: astir everything else, from the USB-C larboard to the idiosyncratic camera sensors, tin beryllium replaced with minimal effort. Replacement parts volition beryllium disposable from Fairphone and iFixit, and the phone’s replaceable backplate besides enables a enactment of swappable accessories akin to those recovered connected the CMF Phone Pro 2.

iFixit besides rated the telephone highly for its IP55 standing — not the champion around, but awesome for a telephone sealed with screws alternatively than glue — and for the company’s longterm support. Fairphone is guaranteeing 7 years of Android OS updates and 8 years of information patches, with a five-year warranty and a loyalty programme that rewards you for hanging onto your telephone and repairing it.

Despite the precocious score, iFixit acknowledges that you bash compromise connected specs by opting for the Fairphone 6. Its dual rear camera is reasonably basic, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 chipset is nary powerhouse. Even the USB larboard is constricted to sluggish USB 2.0, though the 6.3-inch 10-120Hz LTPO OLED show is much impressive.

This isn’t the archetypal Fairphone to fare truthful well. Every exemplary since the Fairphone 2 has received a 10/10 successful iFixit’s teardown tests, a people that nary different telephone has ever managed. The Fairphone 6 is disposable present successful Europe for €599 (around $705), from Fairphone and different retailers. It costs considerably much successful the US, astatine $899, wherever it’s lone disposable from Murena and ships moving /e/OS, Murena’s privacy-focused and de-Googled instrumentality connected Android. It’s disposable to preorder now, and ships successful August.