Dutch company Fairphone continues to lead the way in consumer and eco-friendly electronics, proving that a great phone doesn’t have to be unfixable or environmentally unsustainable. The Fairphone 6 has just been released, two years after the last generation of the phone was built to last. iFixit wasted no time in tearing it down to see how it compares to previous generations. The Fairphone 6 scored a perfect 10 out of 10, just like every Fairphone generation since the first.
Fairphones are modular and designed to be easy to repair, but there’s one change from previous generations that makes things more difficult. While the last few Fairphones used hard batteries that could be removed with a fingernail, the new phone has a soft case that’s thinner than its predecessors. This has reduced the size of the phone, but it means the battery is now held in place by five screws.
The same goes for all the other components of the phone, as none of them are held together by glue. The lack of glue explains the phone’s IP55 rating, which is lower than the rest of the industry. But considering you can’t get a video tutorial from Samsung that tells you how to open the phone using just a T5 Torx screwdriver, there are some doubts.
iFixit is quick to point out that the Fairphone 6 is not a cutting-edge smartphone, nor was it intended to be. It’s designed from the ground up to be as eco-friendly and repairable as possible, which means some compromises compared to flagship devices. The Fairphone 6’s use of USB 2.0, a lower pixel density screen, and only 8GB of RAM are all necessary design decisions when a device is built with a long lifespan in mind. Still, this almost certainly won’t affect the day-to-day use of the phone for most consumers, and owning a device that you can actually fix yourself might be worth it.
