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
>I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem
I used to feel a bit similarly. But I've since realized they are one of the very few software projects that actually make sensible privacy and security choices.
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.
Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).
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.
A friend had the Fair Phone 4. It broke after a year. Hostile customer support, not worth her time. Idk. Stories of "good guy" indie companies who drop you as soon as you fell for their marketing keep piling up. It may be greed, short sightedness or an incompetent understanding of what it means to have customers, the results are the same. See Framework for another example of this.
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.
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.
See, that's all fine and dandy, but I would not recommend this phone to normal people anyway - especially with their record of introducing random bugs. Their whole strategy is going after niche buyers. Most people just want a phone and go through their carrier or Apple.
I have a friend who was looking into the phone and he was about to purchase it before I mentioned the port, but yes we are just geeks.
The first section talks about a long warranty and sustainability. It talks about long battery life and the replaceable battery.
The next section, which is rather large, talks about the camera benefits. This is a huge section and is a very mainstream selling point.
Next is AI and Gemini, a small section.
Next is Moments, their phone mindfulness suite aimed at people battling smartphone attention/addiction issues, a very common concern among users.
Finally, the last section talks about sustainability as well as tips on switching and “what’s in the box.”
So really, zero of the marketing is aimed at niche buyers. They’re looking to sell to people who want a very normal phone experience but want something long-lasting, intentional, and sustainable, and they still need it primarily as a device to capture photos and memories as well as all the normal daily life use you’d expect.
There is zero mention of niche/nerdy features in the marketing. Tinkering and software customization is never mentioned. Professional/enthusiast use cases are never mentioned. There’s nothing talking about terminal emulation or alternative operating systems or anything of that sort.
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.
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.
Is wireless connectivity a barrier there? My home WiFi goes about twice as fast as USB 2.0.
My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way.
For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again.
When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and connect with CX File Manager. My handheld has USB 3.0 but I don’t find that plugging in a cable is particularly convenient, especially since the NAS box is in my closet.
My iPhone 17 Pro Max has very fast USB-C but I’ve never used it for anything besides charging. I’m sure professional content creation folks know of a workflow where fast USB is helpful but for my smartphone user I can’t think of a reason to use it.
The app I use to sync, Musicbee, doesn't work on Linux, so I have to use Wine, which for stupid reasons prevents me from syncing wirelessly. Just syncing the files isn't the problem. Syncing the metadata (number of times a song has been played, favourites) is the problem, and just dragging-and-dropping the the files onto my phone doesn't solve for this.
If I could do it wirelessly, I would, but I've never found it to be reliable in the first place the few times I've used it before (times may have changed).
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I should criticize them for it too. Though the issue rarely occurs for me on iPhones I think the reason is that the volume buttons are much higher up on the iPhone. So when you do the movement one-handed where the left side rests on your palm and you use a finger to press the power button, the palm doesn't hit volume-down, which does happen on FP6 since the volume buttons are much lower on the side.
It still happened all the time on the FP6 for me after 2 months or so.
Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.
Fairphone has been around since 2013 and all of their models have been plagued by really bad software and hardware issues. I think part of the problem is that the actual hardware and software development is not done by them, but a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile). For clarity, this is not a "everybody produces phones in China". If you look at their Git trees, most commits are from this Chinese ODM. I guess this introduces a delay in fixing issues plus Fairphone is probably just one of their customers.
Also, for anyone worried about security, yes it uses opaque binary blobs of Chinese origin (camera processing stuff by TCL). Well, that aside from usually being months to years behind on Qualcomm firmware blob versions (who do monthly security bulletins) and Linux kernel sources. So Fairphones typically have many known high/critical CVEs.
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.
Why use Verizon directly? It's insanely overpriced. US mobile and others provide better prices, service, features, security, and customer service. If it doesn't work on their towers, US mobile allows you to switch to at&t and t mobile towers.
> 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.
The evolution of low effort copy+paste LLM response. Now Google can track everyone who wants that information and people can be just as rude as before when they copy+pasted LLM responses into conversations, but now it's sly.
That's been true for much of the history of cellular networks, as far as I know - universal standards in Europe, US phones can't (always) be moved between service providers. It used to be even worse in the US, with phones locked to individual carriers regardless of technology.
That's some of the European over-regulation that everyone complains about, compared to unfettered American competition.
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?
How are you going to innovate installing hundreds of thousands of cell towers across the USA?
Mobile network via satellite might increase number of network providers by 1 or 2, but the physics problem of needing tons of physical assets to create a wireless network usable by small, low powered devices remains.
> 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. :-(
AI-like typing detected.
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.
If they wanted to pay trained copy editors, they wouldn't use A.I.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...
> 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.
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.
(Wish it was though.)
> 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.
> 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
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.
How? In what way? Source?
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
I used to feel a bit similarly. But I've since realized they are one of the very few software projects that actually make sensible privacy and security choices.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
this would be like grapheneOS not using pixel because the stock android that ships with it does not respect privacy.
am i missing something?
The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs.
https://us.fairphone.com/carrier-compatibility
https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus
Click on “see all tech specs” and under “compatibility” it says AT&T and Verizon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285
The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.
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.
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
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
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.
I have a friend who was looking into the phone and he was about to purchase it before I mentioned the port, but yes we are just geeks.
Scroll down the marketing page and take note of which subjects take up the largest chunk of the page space:
https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus
The first section talks about a long warranty and sustainability. It talks about long battery life and the replaceable battery.
The next section, which is rather large, talks about the camera benefits. This is a huge section and is a very mainstream selling point.
Next is AI and Gemini, a small section.
Next is Moments, their phone mindfulness suite aimed at people battling smartphone attention/addiction issues, a very common concern among users.
Finally, the last section talks about sustainability as well as tips on switching and “what’s in the box.”
So really, zero of the marketing is aimed at niche buyers. They’re looking to sell to people who want a very normal phone experience but want something long-lasting, intentional, and sustainable, and they still need it primarily as a device to capture photos and memories as well as all the normal daily life use you’d expect.
There is zero mention of niche/nerdy features in the marketing. Tinkering and software customization is never mentioned. Professional/enthusiast use cases are never mentioned. There’s nothing talking about terminal emulation or alternative operating systems or anything of that sort.
My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way.
For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again.
When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and connect with CX File Manager. My handheld has USB 3.0 but I don’t find that plugging in a cable is particularly convenient, especially since the NAS box is in my closet.
My iPhone 17 Pro Max has very fast USB-C but I’ve never used it for anything besides charging. I’m sure professional content creation folks know of a workflow where fast USB is helpful but for my smartphone user I can’t think of a reason to use it.
If I could do it wirelessly, I would, but I've never found it to be reliable in the first place the few times I've used it before (times may have changed).
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).
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.
Yeah, I should criticize them for it too. Though the issue rarely occurs for me on iPhones I think the reason is that the volume buttons are much higher up on the iPhone. So when you do the movement one-handed where the left side rests on your palm and you use a finger to press the power button, the palm doesn't hit volume-down, which does happen on FP6 since the volume buttons are much lower on the side.
It still happened all the time on the FP6 for me after 2 months or so.
Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.
Fairphone has been around since 2013 and all of their models have been plagued by really bad software and hardware issues. I think part of the problem is that the actual hardware and software development is not done by them, but a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile). For clarity, this is not a "everybody produces phones in China". If you look at their Git trees, most commits are from this Chinese ODM. I guess this introduces a delay in fixing issues plus Fairphone is probably just one of their customers.
Also, for anyone worried about security, yes it uses opaque binary blobs of Chinese origin (camera processing stuff by TCL). Well, that aside from usually being months to years behind on Qualcomm firmware blob versions (who do monthly security bulletins) and Linux kernel sources. So Fairphones typically have many known high/critical CVEs.
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.
> 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.
That's some of the European over-regulation that everyone complains about, compared to unfettered American competition.
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?
Mobile network via satellite might increase number of network providers by 1 or 2, but the physics problem of needing tons of physical assets to create a wireless network usable by small, low powered devices remains.
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. :-(