Fairphone said Tuesday that its latest smartphone, the Fairphone 6+, is now available in the U.S. starting at $649, a small crack in the usual phone racket where users are expected to buy sealed devices, accept planned obsolescence, and hand over control to the companies that built the thing.
The Dutch company said this is the first time people in the U.S. can buy its phones directly without any modifications. Before that, Fairphone had leaned on a partnership with French open-source operating system maker e/OS to sell a "de-Googled" version of earlier models in the United States. That’s the kind of workaround people end up needing when corporate platforms and their gatekeepers decide what counts as a usable device.
Who Controls the Device
Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck framed the launch in language that cuts against the disposable logic of the market. "We’re delivering a device built from the ground up to be opened, repaired, and kept alive for many years," he said. The sentence lands because it names the opposite of the standard arrangement: a product designed not for the owner’s use, but for the company’s next sale.
The Fairphone 6+ runs on Qualcomm’s mid-range Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and has 12GB of RAM. It has a 4,415 mAh battery with support for 30W fast-charging and a 6.31 LTPO OLED display with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Its main camera has a 50-megapixel Sony sensor with an f/1.88 aperture, the secondary camera has a 13-megapixel ultrawide sensor with an f/2.2 aperture, and the front selfie camera is a 32-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 aperture.
Those specs matter because they show Fairphone isn’t selling some stripped-down relic. It’s trying to compete inside the same market while refusing one of its nastier rules: that the user should be locked out of the machine they paid for.
What Gets Replaced, What Gets Kept
The phone has 12 replaceable parts, including the battery, cameras, USB-C port and display, which can be swapped out using a single screwdriver. That’s the real break from the usual corporate script. Instead of forcing people into repair shops, upgrades, or full replacements, the design gives users a way to keep the device alive with their own hands.
Fairphone offers five years of warranty and software support until 2033. The company said it reduced the carbon footprint to 30 kg of CO2e for each Fairphone 6+ it manufactured. It also said the phone is available in Forest Green, Horizon Black and Cobalt Blue, and that it is selling accessories including a finger loop, lanyard and card holder that users can install by removing the back cover.
The launch also shows how tightly the phone market is still bound to the big platforms. Fairphone said the Fairphone 6+ will support T-Mobile and AT&T at launch. Even a device built around repair and longevity still has to move through the infrastructure controlled by major carriers. The hardware may resist one form of waste, but the system around it remains the same old hierarchy of access, compatibility and permission.
The company’s U.S. release arrives on the same day it announced the phone was available, a reminder that even alternatives have to fight for space inside a market dominated by sealed ecosystems and corporate control. Fairphone is offering a different relationship to technology. The rest of the industry keeps selling dependence and calling it innovation.