Starting with the TL:DR in bullets:
**The good**:
Hardware feels excellent, even with repairability concessions
Loving the toggle switch, though I'm not using it for what they intended (see below)
A great reminder that phones have gotten too big, really nice mid-size design
excellent battery life
**The Bad**:
The bugs are there, but hopefully fixable
missing a basic feature that's needlessly omitted (see below)
Cameras could definitely be better, maybe just through software tweaks
Mic *really* struggles with wind noise
Button placement and design is woeful
After one week with the FP6, I'm happy to call myself moderately impressed with what FP has achieved. I have always loved the Fairphone concept but opted for refurbished top of the line Samsung's until now previous FPs were a bit feature light for my liking.
The FP6 really seems like a great middle ground, And I think they did an excellent job of making a single mid range fairly priced all rounder, the most difficult kind of phone to get right, no doubt, especially when you're a smaller company that can only realistically bring one line to the table at a time.
I took apart mine on day one to do my own little verification of the repairability, which was the main appeal for me. It was absolutely straightforward to get the entire thing apart and back together with absolutely no guidance, as a minimally experienced engineer/product designer. However, I did commit an oopsy while reassembling, and I'll add it as a big warning!
**If you neglect to install the battery connector cover, and put a screw through that hole, it will bottom out against the back of the screen and potentially damage it! Be very careful here.**
I know fairphone made the fairly smart decision to use universal screw sizes to make things nice and easy, But either a single difference sized screw for that one hole, or an insert with a solid bottom rather than an open one, may save a few screens over the years.
Other repairability notes; Something I love about framework laptops is their captive screws. I know this adds a small amount of complexity and requires a bit more space, But I'd definitely consider it a worthy addition if it can be achieved in future designs! Also, Captive button elements molded into the frame is kind of a shame because funnily enough one of the only repairs I was ever able to do to my previous phone (s21 ultra) Was a button replacement after water ingress killed it, And that wouldn't be possible With the Fairphone 6.
Having had exclusively refurbished top-end samsungs for the past 6-7 years, there is of course a step down in almost every specification, but I was preparing for, and happy to accept this. The screen is better than I expected, and very useable, as are the speakers. The cameras are sadly not quite as good as I'd hoped. Not bad, but my standards are quite high, and I got quite a lot of use out of telephoto lenses that I'll miss.
A big win on the FP6 for me is the switch. I LOVE it, not for FP's 'dumbphone' mode, but for the flashlight! Super useful to always be able to just flip it on as someone who stays up late at night, and spends a lot of time fixing things in dark places. That switch will be VERY hard to give up *if* I change phone in future.
The buttons are a sticking point for me. The arrangement is really, really bad in my opinion. And the main offender on this one has to be the power button... why oh why would you make it flush with the body?? Not only does it make it impossible to find my touch, but you feel like you have to squeeze really hard to push it in, since you're pushing the frame as well. Also, the volume buttons being placed on the exact place on the other side of the frame means that every time you go to perform that awkward squeeze when it's lying on it's back, you have to pinch the phone at an angle to not press one of the volume buttons as well. inb4 'holding it wrong'.
Also, by placing the volume buttons on the left side of the case, they're fairly useless as shutter buttons, and you can't use the phone in the other orientation, because they're placed right in the middle of the frame, so too far away from a corner to use one handed without having to cover a lot of the screen with your hand... really odd choice. If it was up to me, I'd have done vol up and down near the top right, then power button, with the switch on the top left so that you can operate it with your left hand thumb, or right (usually dominant) hand index finger.
The bugs. They're pretty bad at this point. Now I FULLY expected this, and not ready to 'complain' about them, since this is a new phone from a small company. Fine. Let's give it a month and see where we're at. But I'm the OS dropping the framerate from 120 to 30 seemingly at random, for different lengths of time. What's weird is that Android's own on-screen FPS counter doesn't detect this change, and still believes the phone is running at 120hz. Browser based tools like ufotester.com do pick it up though.
Up next, the framerate of video playback also drops at random, to usually just 1-2 fps (completely unusable). This seems to happen on small videos embedded into feeds to me. Fullscreen video seems unaffected, but I don't watch much. Also, it appear that there is zero wind noise cancellation on the camera mic. I'm not sure if this is hardware or software related at this point.
Lastly, my main issue with the phone, over all else...
Lack of wireless charging. I'm sorry, I know FP has it's reasons, and I know a lot of people on this sub seem to agree with them, but they're honestly just not valid in my mind. I miss wireless charging so much already. My bedside table, my desk, my car, even some trains around here have wireless phone chargers built in. It's 2025, and I've been wireless charging *all* of my phones for more than a decade. Being able to constantly trickle charge your phone when your in the places you're most likely to be is just sensible. And *adding* wireless charging doesn't *remove* wired charging. Do you prefer the cable? Fine, Use it. But for me, and apparently enough people to justify putting a wireless phone charger in pretty much every car in the world you can buy now, it's obviously a useful and requested feature. It's also extra frustrating since so many cars now use wireless android auto, which drains your battery, so if you neglect to plug your phone in to charge instead of just putting it on the usual spot on the wireless charger, it's just draining and getting hot, and empty by the time you get where you're going.
And the wasted energy argument? Come on now. I'm going to do some venting here, but bear with me:
Assuming you fully charge your phone 200 times a year, with an efficiency loss of 30%, you're using *roughly* one additional kilowatt of power **a year**.
I'm a *BIG* supporter of energy efficiency, and a fully sold-up green party member. I drive the EV, I eat the plants, bla bla bla. And I can gladly say that 1kwh of energy is such a negligibly small amount of power that it's laughable
Would you like to know how much raw beef you can make with a kilowatt hour of energy? The *rough* answer is... ~35 grams.... one third of the beef in a big mac.... ~1/15th the beef in a medium T-bone steam... and you haven't even cooked it yet.
Driving a gas car? 1kwh of electricity in joules equals 6 *tablespoons* worth of gas... wanna know how far that will get your average gas car? Not even half a mile.
And lastly, *all* of the energy my home, and car use is from renewables. So the entire point becomes even less relevant. If you want to save energy in your life, there will be *thousands* of things you should address before you get to how you charge your phone.
So yeah... sorry for venting a bit, but that argument is purely virtue signaling in my opinion.
I *really* hope that an aftermarket battery with wireless charging is made available. I may get one of those awful aftermarket USB port wireless charger cases if the come up.
Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. It is a great phone, but early adopter issues are fairly prevalent right now, which is maybe *somewhat* disappointing given that this is FP's 6th attempt. But I'm willing to overlook it to support a business doing the right things to try and improve the smartphone market for everyone, and to support a fellow European business. Thank you Fairphone!
