In addition to being repairable, the Fairphone is, well, a good phone. I am a heavy phone user. It’s not something I’m necessarily proud of, but it is true, and the Fairphone easily handled everything I needed it to. I played Tiny Rails for too long, had the phone guide me on a few miles of hiking, and juggled different apps and accounts on several errand-heavy days. I need all of those things to be quickly available while I’m on the go, and a slow phone would have been frustrating.
The Fairphone was plenty capable, and I never missed my Pixel. The Fairphone’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor was snappy and responsive on simple and demanding tasks alike. It also has 12 GB of RAM, 50% more than you get in other moderately priced phones, such as the Google Pixel 10a, the Samsung Galaxy A57 5G, and the iPhone 17e. Similar to those other phones, the Fairphone has a 6.3-inch OLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, which enables smooth scrolling, plus a 4,415 mAh battery and 30 W charging speeds.
The battery life was solid, lasting more than a day on a charge — though not quite the two days that Fairphone advertises. It helps that the phone has zero junk apps installed on startup, because that means nothing is running in the background and draining the battery.
One of my biggest turnoffs with new phones is how overprocessed their photos look to my eye. New Pixel models are the worst offenders in this regard, turning out clownishly color-corrected (and sometimes AI-generated) photos that hardly resemble my memory of the event. I was surprised at how refreshing the Fairphone camera experience was; so too was my colleague Max Eddy, who also tested the Fairphone Gen 6+.
Left: The areas in shade are a little muted in this landscape shot, but the colors of the sky and the sunny valley below pop. Right: The contrast of my tomato harvest against the grass makes the rich reds stand out. Ivy Liscomb/NYT Wirecutter
The Fairphone has a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide rear camera, and a 32-megapixel front camera, as well as the ability to shoot 4K video at 30 frames per second (the Google Pixel 10a, Samsung Galaxy A57 5G, and iPhone 17e all have similar specs). I shot photos in the sun and shade, outside and inside, and I was surprised at how quickly the camera responded. I never had to wait for a shot to process before taking another one, and the resulting photos evoked a time when phone cameras were getting good, but automatic post-processing was not as heavily applied as it is now.
Max’s shot of a sunset over a 215th Street subway station came out pretty balanced on autofocus, though the brightest point is a little overexposed. Max Eddy/NYT Wirecutter
We spotted some issues — Max noted that a few of his shots came out less focused than he’d intended, and one photo I took of a giant mushroom on my hike came out bland and flat. But the photos had an honest quality that was nice, and I didn’t miss the super-processed pictures that my Pixel takes.
The neon-yellow Moments switch is quite obvious, but the power button is flush with the side of the phone, which took a little getting used to for both of our testers. Ivy Liscomb/NYT Wirecutter
The Fairphone also has a mode called Moments, which is designed to limit distraction. Flip the neon-yellow switch on the right edge of the phone, and it gives you access to just the basics — you can choose which texts and calls will come through, but all others will be silenced. It didn’t seem to offer a way to whitelist apps for notifications, which can be annoying if you primarily message in a third-party app such as WhatsApp or Signal, but you can add your preferred messaging app to the home-screen app list and check it periodically if need be. I found myself switching Moments on when I wanted to spend some quiet time reading, or when I wanted to be focused at work (though I did experience some anxiety over missing an imaginary important call). If you’re not interested in a more stripped-down mode, you can easily remap the Moments switch in the Settings app to another function or turn it off completely.