Fairphone 6 Plus Review

Design

• Chunky plastic frame
• Funky new Cobalt Blue colour
• IP54 water and dust resistance

The big thing with the Fairphone 6 Plus is the presence of a new colourway, with the Cobalt Blue my sample shipped in available alongside the returning Horizon Black and Forest Green. 

The introduction of Cobalt Blue, according to Fairphone, is no accident, and is there to pay homage to the brand’s origins as an awareness campaign against the use of conflict minerals in consumer electronics and its position as a co-founder of the Fair Cobalt Alliance. It’s also the first electronics manufacturer to introduce Fair Cobalt Credits and to pay a fair premium for the cobalt used in its smartphones based on those credits.

Alongside its important reasoning, the Cobalt Blue also helps the Fairphone 6 Plus offer a funkier and more vivid aesthetic than a lot of its rivals. It’s a deep blue colour that’s nicely offset by the yellow of its toggle switch on the right side, while I’m also a fan of the minimal camera bump and exposed screwholes on the rear for convenient repairability. Two small screws take off the rear panel, and you’re off to the races.

After all, the whole point of this phone is how repairable it is, and Fairphone is offering a bevvy of spare parts for everything from its USB-C port to the camera modules, loudspeaker, rear covers, earpiece, battery, screen and SIM-SD combo tray.

The Fairphone 6 Plus has a matted finish to it that can be a little easy to pick up fingerprints, although it feels pleasant in hand with a grippy texture and a compact frame. The lack of any real camera bump also means it sits virtually flush to a table and isn’t wobbly by default, which is nice to see. This is made of plastic, so it lacks more of a premium finish found in rivals, but it’s fine for the most part.

This phone has flat edges, which keep it right on trend with this year’s flagships, as it seems like we’ve moved beyond curved edges and back to flat again. The bezel around the edge of the screen is a little thick at the top and bottom, though.

Ports across the bottom are standard fare, with a USB-C port and a pop-out SIM tray. The SIM tray also doubles as a microSD card slot for expandable storage, which is neat. For buttons, you’ll find a volume rocker and power button in their usual places on the right side, plus a toggle switch for the Essentials software experience.

The IP55 dust and splash resistance is fine, given the more repairable nature of this handset, and while you can get IP68-rated phones that are more robust, they trade the ability to easily swap out parts as well as the Fairphone. 

Screen

• 6.31-inch 120Hz 1116×2484 OLED
• 1400 nits peak brightness
• Smaller screen is pleasant to use

Fairphone hasn’t adjusted the screen of the Fairphone 6 Plus against its predecessor, sticking with a compact 6.31-inch OLED panel, complete with a 120Hz refresh rate and a sharp 1116×2484 resolution for a great level of detail across a smaller screen.

It may not be as large as some of the other screens I’ve seen on more modestly-priced handsets, but I don’t mind that. The real estate on offer here is still more than enough for most folks, and it’s been nice to daily-drive a smaller phone for a change.

Fairphone rates the screen for up to 1400 nits of peak brightness, which keeps this panel decently bright and sharp for indoor and outdoor use. At peak, it’s enough to deal with the sunny and warm days the UK has had in the time I’ve tested the phone, and I’ve been impressed with it, although you will get brighter panels from other phones.

Having up to 120Hz of refresh rate on offer helps general zippiness, and is a surefire bump if you’re moving from a more standard 60Hz or slightly higher panel. This phone’s screen is also an LTPO screen, meaning it should dynamically adjust the refresh rate based on the contents of your screen, and can go from 10Hz to 120Hz.

The fingerprint sensor isn’t contained on the screen at all; instead, it lives on the phone’s power button. I actually find this more ergonomic with the way I hold a phone, and it’s nice and simple to enrol a finger and unlock the phone in a pinch.

Cameras

• Identical setup to the previous model
• Reasonable detail retention on main sensor
• Lack of a telephoto means fuzzier ‘zoom’

Fairphone hasn’t upgraded the camera setup for the Fairphone 6 Plus, which is a bit of a shame, given that this is designed as an upgraded variant of the older Gen 6. For reference, that means it’s sticking with a 50MP 1/1.56-inch-sized f/1.88 main snapper alongside a 13MP f/2.2 ultrawide.

General shots out of the 50MP main snapper are pleasant enough, with good dynamic range and decently punchy colours. Detail retention is fine, although pixel peep and you’ll see some of the image comes out as being blurry. This feels more like a budget camera setup than a mid-range one out of the gate.

By comparison, the 13MP ultrawide is surprisingly poppier in its colours than the main sensor’s, and the detail is mostly fine.  Finer portions are fuzzier if you pixel-peep, though, especially in the corners of an image.

Low-light and night performance is also fine, if a little unimpressive for the price point. It can be a bit noisy in places, and images come out a smidgen blurry.

The lack of a telephoto lens is the downfall of the Fairphone 6 Plus’s camera setup, as it means anything beyond a simple 2x or 3x zoom can cause detail to fall off dramatically. For instance, the images I’d taken of pub signage around London, beyond the advised 2x on the phone’s camera, leave a lot to be desired, with a digital crop nowhere near as effective as proper optical zoom. A dedicated telephoto would have resolved the fuzziness and given a lot more to work with.

For selfies, the 32MP snapper on the front is okay, with good richness of colour and a pleasant tone. Video capabilities in any guise are locked to a max of 1080p/60fps or 4K/30fps, which is fine, if unremarkable. 

Performance

• Mid-tier Qualcomm SoC inside
• Outright grunt is lacking against mid-range handsets
• More advanced 3D loads can lead to stutters

The Fairphone 6 Plus’s big upgrade comes internally, with it moving to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 SoC alongside a bump up to 12GB of RAM. This is a move up from the Gen 3 chip in the old phone, and a third more RAM – the old model came with 8GB.

Even with this chip upgrade in mind though, the higher price this phone sits at against older Fairphones means it’s now a squarely upper-mid-range option, rather than a more affordable one. 

Single-core performance in my testing is fine with this new chip, although it’s in heavier multi-threaded workloads where the Fairphone 6 Plus begins to slow down against beefier mid-rangers such as the Xiaomi 17T or the Honor 600, the latter of which comes with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 – perhaps a better fit for this handset.

General performance here is more in line with phones at half its cost, such as the Nothing Phone 4b, and is beaten by the Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 4G.

For general use, things are a bit better than the benchmark numbers would suggest in my experience, with zippy performance navigating the operating system, streaming music or video or dealing with social media in my usual workflow.

You’ve got 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage out of the box, although you can also supplement this with up to 1TB of space with a microSD card slot. Just be prepared to pay out for microSD cards, given the current pricing situation of flash storage.

In terms of 3D performance, more casual titles such as COD Mobile or PUBG fare absolutely fine, just as long as you’re happy to turn down some graphics settings for a smoother feel. However, this is one of the only phones where I couldn’t even get the 3DMark suite of tests to run, and it wasn’t that they were locked or anything; it just kept erroring out.

For more prolonged intensive loads, expect this Fairphone handset to get a little on the warm side, although it wasn’t uncomfortable to the point I had to put it down. The Fairphone 6 Plus’s cooling apparatus seems to do its job decently well.

Software & AI

• Remarkably clean Android 16 launcher
• A couple of Fairphone-specific apps installed
• Solid OS and security update commitments

In keeping with the rest of its aesthetic, the Fairphone 6 Plus features a remarkably clean and simple Android 16 setup. It feels a lot like Google’s Pixel launcher, lacking in bloat and wonderfully easy to use with some additional Fairphone flair.

That comes in the form of a pleasant green default colour scheme, and access to the My Fairphone app in the bottom row by default. The rest are contained in an app drawer, much like a Pixel. This app allows you to check device info and phone health, as well as access spare parts, accessories and video tutorials.

There is also a social aspect to the My Fairphone app, too, with access to the Fairphone forum and a Stories section to boot.

One of the only other Fairphone-specific apps pre-installed with this phone is its Gallery app, which now allows you to store photos and videos locally without depending on third-party solutions. It’s a nice addition for more control over your own images.

I’m a big fan of the slider on the right side of the Fairphone 6 Plus’s chassis, with it reminding me of the old notification slider you used to get on OnePlus phones.

By default, the slider switches the phone to an ‘Essentials’ UI, so it just shows apps such as the Camera, Phone and Maps. This turns the phone more into something such as a Light Phone if you’re opting for a digital detox, although it’s easy enough to return to a normal Android UI when you want to.

Otherwise, there are also Google’s latest AI additions, such as Circle to Search and utilising Gemini as an assistant.

Fairphone has committed to “software support through 2033” with the Fairphone 6 Plus, offering six years of Android updates. The phone also comes backed with a five-year warranty.

Battery Life

• 4415 mAh battery
• 30W wired charging
• No wireless charging support

The Fairphone Gen 6+ features a 4415mAh battery (the same size as the Gen 6), which was enough to get through a day or two’s worth of my usual workload when it came to an intensive day of multi-tasking and using my phone as normal.

It’s a smaller battery than you’ll get in a lot of other phones at this price, but it has the advantage of being easily replaceable, as with a lot of the handset’s other components.

You can squeeze around five to six hours of screen-on time scrolling social media, streaming music over Tidal and Plexamp, taking photos when out and about and using Google Docs in a pinch for work.

For a more scientific test, a cursory run of the PCMark Work V3.0 battery test at 50% brightness worked out to around 15 and a half hours of use. That’s a pretty good result.

Up to 30W of wired fast charging is supported here, and the Fairphone 6 Plus can get back to 50% in 33 minutes using my fast charger, with a full charge taking 75 minutes. This phone doesn’t support any form of wireless charging, though that’s far from common in the mid-range at this point.

Should you buy it?