8 ms·

Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

397 points by Vinnl 1mo ago

AdmiralAsshat 1mo ago
No Verizon support. :(
- Alcor 1mo ago
  How is that still a thing? I can’t think of a phone here in Europe that you can’t just put a SIM card from any carrier in and it will work.
  - davey48016 1mo ago
    From Fairphone's US order page > 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.
  - Onawa 1mo ago
    Because the United States sucks in regards to mobile phone compatibility and spectrum allocation. https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ
    - Zambyte 1mo ago
      What is that link?
      - righthand 1mo ago
        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.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mmooss 1mo ago
    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.
- Noaidi 1mo ago
  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?
  - delfinom 1mo ago
    Innovation in the US is mainly how many more creative ways they can suck money out of consumers.
  - mxuribe 1mo ago
    > 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. :-(
  - lotsofpulp 1mo ago
    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 guess you could innovate some new physics that allows you to send wireless signals through more surfaces, that is also not ionizing radiation to animal and plant tissue, and doesn’t need a lot of power to send from a mobile device. That is a lot to ask, though.
    - Noaidi 1mo ago
      Cell towers in the United States are primarily owned by three major companies: American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications. These companies build, acquire, and lease space on the towers to wireless providers. No more infrastructure needs to be built.
- wilsonnb3 1mo ago
  Interesting, the tech specs page said Verizon was supported but the carrier coverage page says it isn’t
- Cider9986 1mo ago
  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.
mrbluecoat 1mo ago
"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled." https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-or-interest-in-working-together-with-fairphone/3 https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...
- gruez 1mo ago
  Here's a post with more specific allegations: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-standard-privacysecurity-patches-and-protections-arent-private https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
- NoboruWataya 1mo ago
  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).
  - stymaar 1mo ago
    Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features: > 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.
    - hokumguru 1mo ago
      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.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
threemux 1mo ago
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.
- Grombobulous 1mo ago
  The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…
  - threemux 1mo ago
    To which device are you referring? 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/carrier-compatibility
    - Grombobulous 1mo ago
      Oh this is weird. They have some contradicting information. https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus Click on “see all tech specs” and under “compatibility” it says AT&T and Verizon. But it lacks Verizon’s primary band and clearly can’t be used with it.
      - qmarchi 1mo ago
        Likely because Verizon will only let "certified by Verizon" devices on their network, while AT&T and T-Mo will let pretty much anything with an LTE modem connect.
commoner 1mo ago
Exciting to see this soon after someone got the Fairphone 6 camera working on postmarketOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285 The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.
- emaro 1mo ago
  They even mention that they want to move on to work on the Fairphone 6+.
- pizzaiolo 1mo ago
  Luca Weiss (Fairphone employee and pmOS dev) has confirmed on the wiki that the FP6 image also works on FP6+: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Fairphone_%28Gen._6%29_%28fairphone-fp6%29&diff=104651&oldid=102743 https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Fairphone_%28G...
Runways 1mo ago
USB 2.0 port is the only thing preventing me from purchasing one. A wild choice since I believe previous versions did not have this limitation.
- zyberzero 1mo ago
  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
  - Runways 1mo ago
    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. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and-missing-desktop-mode/119714 https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
    - zyberzero 1mo ago
      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.
    - Grombobulous 1mo ago
      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.
amazingamazing 1mo ago
$650 for anyone who does not want to click. Hard sell compared to the iPhone 17e but more choice is good.
- Noaidi 1mo ago
  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.
  - hedora 1mo ago
    I’d pay twice what they are asking for one with a reasonably sized screen. 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.
  - guywithahat 1mo ago
    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.
    - fsflover 1mo ago
      You can also carry one or two spare batteries with you and get from zero to 100% charge in a minute.
    - Fnoord 1mo ago
      5-7 years? With daily use device 100% drain your battery will be about 85-90% health after 1,5 years. Once it gets to 80%, Apple recommends replacement. I'd say replacement should occur at approc 2-3 years of daily usage.
  - microtonal 1mo ago
    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. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/dns-over-tls-ipv6-issues-apps-dont-load-data-over-wifi/130519 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).
VyseofArcadia 1mo ago
Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone. 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.
- Grombobulous 1mo ago
  This is still a big deal and seems to come with more expanded carrier support.
- fooqux 1mo ago
  Yeah, but only the Fairphone 4 (which is very dated at this point), and only from Murena which is a can of worms in itself. Support also ranges from non-existent to atrocious. Directly buying from FP is a huge deal for me.
- saturn8601 1mo ago
  How have the Fairbuds XL been for you? Have you used any other similar headphones before Fairbuds (asking for your comparison). I love my Airpod Maxes but I have spend way too much money and time keeping this thing maintained. Once it finally kicks the can, I really want to try something more repair friendly.
the_gamedev 1mo ago
[flagged]
ThinkingGuy 1mo ago
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. AI-like typing detected.
- nemomarx 1mo ago
  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?
  - lotsofpulp 1mo ago
    >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.
    - nemomarx 1mo ago
      Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.
      - monegator 1mo ago
        SEO, basically. Same as before
      - braiamp 1mo ago
        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.
      - dcow 1mo ago
jarbus 1mo ago
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.
- fooqux 1mo ago
  Considering the big players with R&D budgets valued in the billions have been struggling to make foldable phones, I can't imagine a niche player making one.
dmix 1mo ago
That website took a very very long time to load.
roflcopter69 1mo ago
[flagged]
newsy-combi 1mo ago
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.
- dustinmoorenet 1mo ago
  My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
- saturn8601 1mo ago
  Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money). Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.
- gigatree 1mo ago
  Moral licensing probably. If they get social points for building a “fair” product they’re less incentivized to be “fair” in other areas. Also why the people who virtue signal the most tend to be the quite rude irl.
- forty 1mo ago
  This doesn't match my experience at all. I'm writing this from my fairphone 3 purchased in 2019 the day of release. I purchased one for me, one for my wife. I replaced the battery on mine once, my wife never had to change it. Her phone started so show sign of age a few month ago, she switched to the FP6. I will switch to the FP6+ soon as the support come to end this month for the FP3 (I could switch this one to eOS, but performance wise, it's not in it's prime, so I figured I could afford an upgrade after 7 years ^^). I reached out to support quite a few times for my wife or I (for order reasons, issues with operators, bugs, etc) and they have always been excellent for me.
Gormo 1mo ago
No standard audio jack? That's a dealbreaker for me, especially for something touting modularity, repairability, and user control.
- stronglikedan 1mo ago
  It's a ten dollar dongle that can stay attached to your audio cable out of the way when not using it and has no perceptible affect on sound quality, and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge, so the whole no-audio-jack thing is a moot point nowadays. It's a solved problem for years now.
  - Gormo 1mo ago
    Using a dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio, which I do all the time. I also frequently interchange my wired earbuds between my phone and laptop, and don't want to be bothered with an extra loose dongle when I disconnect the earbuds. Sorry, this isn't a solved problem at all, apart from the solution of only buying phones that have audio jacks.
    - filoleg 1mo ago
      > dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio I feel like you missed the part where the parent comment said "[...] and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge".
      - SoftTalker 1mo ago
        I have a passthrough dongle so I can charge my iPhone in the car and use an aux audio patch cable, and it's quite a large thing, certainly not unobtrusive but if you're charging maybe that doesn't really matter. Something like https://www.belkin.com/p/3.5mm-audio-plus-usb-c-charge-adapter/NPA004btWH.html https://www.belkin.com/p/3.5mm-audio-plus-usb-c-charge-adapt...
idiotsecant 1mo ago
I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.
- teekert 1mo ago
  This always comes up, it will probably never happen, makes me sad as well.
  - grapheneos 1mo ago
    See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122.
    - teekert 1mo ago
      [flagged]
      - phasephantasm 1mo ago
        Perhaps you misunderstood why is criticism voiced in the first place. What you ask for is here, as it has always been: > https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices A part of the criticism of Fairphone is exactly that they aren't even particularly sustainable or repairable, or ethical, have you read the posts. So there is no choice, not between the two groups you presented as opposing. They aren't even opposing each other as currently Pixels stand as fairly easy to repair and source some genuine parts for via Google's official iFixIt partnership. An OEM reads the link above and gets the ball rolling as it should, privately, which was what Motorola did after showing up on the public Discord guild with an employee asking for further directions, but being aware of the linked resource already. Obviously GrapheneOS' merit is provably the product and the values it represents, not posts on social media (how could that make sense?). Think of that and how this one-sided criticism of "you should do that to avoid a certain image and get things done" of yours makes no sense either - it didn't scare anyone who would ever: currently only Motorola. Edit: adding to the last point, the same applies to Fairphone but inversely, where they portray themselves as things they are not (sustainable, specially repairable, ethical, even privacy-respecting). Whereas a takeaway from your comment is that GrapheneOS is good but has a negative image (a false premise, in my opinion), Fairphone puts a lot of *effort* to construct a good image that signals the inverse of what they are. Effort ultimately signals intention.
dataflow 1mo ago
Can someone explain why in 2026 we have artificial limits like this? > expandable upto 2TB with microSD I get that 2TB ought to be enough for everybody, but why the heck shouldn't a 4TB microSD Just Work?
- Pfhortune 1mo ago
  Every time I've seen a card capacity limit like this, someone tries a bigger card and it just... works.
- Telaneo 1mo ago
  They just haven't tested anything larger.
- Velocifyer 1mo ago
  The SDXC spec does not allow for cards bigger than 2TiB, because of address sizes. You need SDUC for above 4TB.
Pfhortune 1mo ago
Disappointed they don't have a wireless-charging-enabled backplate. And I was just about ready to pull the trigger... I know wireless charging is wasteful... but I've got magsafe pucks everywhere in the house/car now... Let me have this one thing...
ConanRus 1mo ago
[dead]
vazark 1mo ago
My gripe is the lack of usb 3 / dp-alt support. Fairphone as a whole feels like a company that prioritises the mission, but only this mission of ethical and reusable hardware. The user experience for power users who are most likely to recommend their devices feels like a let-down.
abdullahkhalids 1mo ago
[flagged]
maxglute 1mo ago
How is the OS?
bitwize 1mo ago
grapheneos when?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- grapheneos 1mo ago
  Fairphones have awful updates, privacy and security. They don't provide crucial hardware-based security features needed to have working encryption for the vast majority of users not using a strong passphrase. They don't provide what's required to have decent protection from remote attacks either. Their devices don't provide important driver and firmware updates we need to have for each supported device. Fairphones end up with an end-of-life Linux kernel branch after a couple years and have never migrated to a new one. Fairphone has a very close partnership with Murena and replaced their own open source OS with /e/. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and isn't useful to regular people. They've heavily propagated false claims about the usability, compatibility, privacy and security provided by GrapheneOS. These years of inaccurate claims have resulted in many people being misled about GrapheneOS and have done immense harm to it. /e/ and Murena have even repeatedly claimed private and secure devices in general primarily benefit criminals and pedophiles: https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie... https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142 https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142 Murena is explicitly not on the side of people wanting protection from authoritarian surveillance by governments. Fairphone supported Murena's inaccurate claims when contacted by the media and their employees regularly participate in it. This is what they choose to market as private and secure: https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603 https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603
  - teekert 1mo ago
    [flagged]
g8425 1mo ago
I purchased a Fairphone 6 thinking I was going to solve a lot of issues I had with more popular phone models. This has not been the case. I think that when all is said and done, Fairphone will have done more to hurt the concept of device repairability than help it. Examples: Within a month of purchase, the little upper speaker grill/mesh sticker fell out. Now this is why I bought a Fairphone - a few clicks, a few days wait and a few screws later and I can easily replace it... not the case. They wanted me to warranty/send in my phone for a sticker replacement on "the world's most repairable phone." Not a great first impression. Another system update they shipped bricked my sim card. No support, no help, just me with a permanent fear of installing any updates in the future.
- Ferret7446 24d ago
  A lot of people forget that "right to repair" means that YOU fix it. There is no silver bullet. You can either rely on a company to fix it for you and not screw you over, or you can do all of the work of sourcing parts and labor, and if you mess up the repair then you own the pieces.
fuckinpuppers 1mo ago
Love this idea but carrier limitations, eSIM limitations, kind of an odd start. I am sure it’s licensing and radio costs or limitations. But I would assume anything launching nowadays would support esims 100% and could jump networks without an issue.

397 points by Vinnl 1mo ago

AdmiralAsshat 1mo ago

No Verizon support. :(

Alcor 1mo ago
How is that still a thing? I can’t think of a phone here in Europe that you can’t just put a SIM card from any carrier in and it will work.
- davey48016 1mo ago
  From Fairphone's US order page > 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.
- Onawa 1mo ago
  Because the United States sucks in regards to mobile phone compatibility and spectrum allocation. https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ https://share.gemini.google/u6E8mAiITMcJ
  - Zambyte 1mo ago
    What is that link?
    - righthand 1mo ago
      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.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- mmooss 1mo ago
  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.
Noaidi 1mo ago
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?
- delfinom 1mo ago
  Innovation in the US is mainly how many more creative ways they can suck money out of consumers.
- mxuribe 1mo ago
  > 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. :-(
- lotsofpulp 1mo ago
  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 guess you could innovate some new physics that allows you to send wireless signals through more surfaces, that is also not ionizing radiation to animal and plant tissue, and doesn’t need a lot of power to send from a mobile device. That is a lot to ask, though.
  - Noaidi 1mo ago
    Cell towers in the United States are primarily owned by three major companies: American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications. These companies build, acquire, and lease space on the towers to wireless providers. No more infrastructure needs to be built.
wilsonnb3 1mo ago
Interesting, the tech specs page said Verizon was supported but the carrier coverage page says it isn’t
Cider9986 1mo ago
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.

mrbluecoat 1mo ago

"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled." https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-or-interest-in-working-together-with-fairphone/3 https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...

gruez 1mo ago
Here's a post with more specific allegations: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-standard-privacysecurity-patches-and-protections-arent-private https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
NoboruWataya 1mo ago
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).
- stymaar 1mo ago
  Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features: > 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.
  - hokumguru 1mo ago
    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.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

threemux 1mo ago

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.

Grombobulous 1mo ago
The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…
- threemux 1mo ago
  To which device are you referring? 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/carrier-compatibility
  - Grombobulous 1mo ago
    Oh this is weird. They have some contradicting information. https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus Click on “see all tech specs” and under “compatibility” it says AT&T and Verizon. But it lacks Verizon’s primary band and clearly can’t be used with it.
    - qmarchi 1mo ago
      Likely because Verizon will only let "certified by Verizon" devices on their network, while AT&T and T-Mo will let pretty much anything with an LTE modem connect.

commoner 1mo ago

Exciting to see this soon after someone got the Fairphone 6 camera working on postmarketOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285 The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.

emaro 1mo ago
They even mention that they want to move on to work on the Fairphone 6+.
pizzaiolo 1mo ago
Luca Weiss (Fairphone employee and pmOS dev) has confirmed on the wiki that the FP6 image also works on FP6+: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Fairphone_%28Gen._6%29_%28fairphone-fp6%29&diff=104651&oldid=102743 https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Fairphone_%28G...

Runways 1mo ago

USB 2.0 port is the only thing preventing me from purchasing one. A wild choice since I believe previous versions did not have this limitation.

zyberzero 1mo ago
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
- Runways 1mo ago
  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. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and-missing-desktop-mode/119714 https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
  - zyberzero 1mo ago
    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.
  - Grombobulous 1mo ago
    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.

amazingamazing 1mo ago

$650 for anyone who does not want to click. Hard sell compared to the iPhone 17e but more choice is good.

Noaidi 1mo ago
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.
- hedora 1mo ago
  I’d pay twice what they are asking for one with a reasonably sized screen. 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.
- guywithahat 1mo ago
  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.
  - fsflover 1mo ago
    You can also carry one or two spare batteries with you and get from zero to 100% charge in a minute.
  - Fnoord 1mo ago
    5-7 years? With daily use device 100% drain your battery will be about 85-90% health after 1,5 years. Once it gets to 80%, Apple recommends replacement. I'd say replacement should occur at approc 2-3 years of daily usage.
- microtonal 1mo ago
  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. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/dns-over-tls-ipv6-issues-apps-dont-load-data-over-wifi/130519 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).

VyseofArcadia 1mo ago

Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone. 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.

Grombobulous 1mo ago
This is still a big deal and seems to come with more expanded carrier support.
fooqux 1mo ago
Yeah, but only the Fairphone 4 (which is very dated at this point), and only from Murena which is a can of worms in itself. Support also ranges from non-existent to atrocious. Directly buying from FP is a huge deal for me.
saturn8601 1mo ago
How have the Fairbuds XL been for you? Have you used any other similar headphones before Fairbuds (asking for your comparison). I love my Airpod Maxes but I have spend way too much money and time keeping this thing maintained. Once it finally kicks the can, I really want to try something more repair friendly.

the_gamedev 1mo ago

[flagged]

ThinkingGuy 1mo ago

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. AI-like typing detected.

nemomarx 1mo ago
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?
- lotsofpulp 1mo ago
  >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.
  - nemomarx 1mo ago
    Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.
    - monegator 1mo ago
      SEO, basically. Same as before
    - braiamp 1mo ago
      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.
    - dcow 1mo ago

jarbus 1mo ago

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.

fooqux 1mo ago
Considering the big players with R&D budgets valued in the billions have been struggling to make foldable phones, I can't imagine a niche player making one.

dmix 1mo ago

That website took a very very long time to load.

roflcopter69 1mo ago

[flagged]

newsy-combi 1mo ago

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.

dustinmoorenet 1mo ago
My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
saturn8601 1mo ago
Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money). Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.
gigatree 1mo ago
Moral licensing probably. If they get social points for building a “fair” product they’re less incentivized to be “fair” in other areas. Also why the people who virtue signal the most tend to be the quite rude irl.
forty 1mo ago
This doesn't match my experience at all. I'm writing this from my fairphone 3 purchased in 2019 the day of release. I purchased one for me, one for my wife. I replaced the battery on mine once, my wife never had to change it. Her phone started so show sign of age a few month ago, she switched to the FP6. I will switch to the FP6+ soon as the support come to end this month for the FP3 (I could switch this one to eOS, but performance wise, it's not in it's prime, so I figured I could afford an upgrade after 7 years ^^). I reached out to support quite a few times for my wife or I (for order reasons, issues with operators, bugs, etc) and they have always been excellent for me.

Gormo 1mo ago

No standard audio jack? That's a dealbreaker for me, especially for something touting modularity, repairability, and user control.

stronglikedan 1mo ago
It's a ten dollar dongle that can stay attached to your audio cable out of the way when not using it and has no perceptible affect on sound quality, and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge, so the whole no-audio-jack thing is a moot point nowadays. It's a solved problem for years now.
- Gormo 1mo ago
  Using a dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio, which I do all the time. I also frequently interchange my wired earbuds between my phone and laptop, and don't want to be bothered with an extra loose dongle when I disconnect the earbuds. Sorry, this isn't a solved problem at all, apart from the solution of only buying phones that have audio jacks.
  - filoleg 1mo ago
    > dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio I feel like you missed the part where the parent comment said "[...] and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge".
    - SoftTalker 1mo ago
      I have a passthrough dongle so I can charge my iPhone in the car and use an aux audio patch cable, and it's quite a large thing, certainly not unobtrusive but if you're charging maybe that doesn't really matter. Something like https://www.belkin.com/p/3.5mm-audio-plus-usb-c-charge-adapter/NPA004btWH.html https://www.belkin.com/p/3.5mm-audio-plus-usb-c-charge-adapt...

idiotsecant 1mo ago

I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.

teekert 1mo ago
This always comes up, it will probably never happen, makes me sad as well.
- grapheneos 1mo ago
  See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122.
  - teekert 1mo ago
    [flagged]
    - phasephantasm 1mo ago
      Perhaps you misunderstood why is criticism voiced in the first place. What you ask for is here, as it has always been: > https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices A part of the criticism of Fairphone is exactly that they aren't even particularly sustainable or repairable, or ethical, have you read the posts. So there is no choice, not between the two groups you presented as opposing. They aren't even opposing each other as currently Pixels stand as fairly easy to repair and source some genuine parts for via Google's official iFixIt partnership. An OEM reads the link above and gets the ball rolling as it should, privately, which was what Motorola did after showing up on the public Discord guild with an employee asking for further directions, but being aware of the linked resource already. Obviously GrapheneOS' merit is provably the product and the values it represents, not posts on social media (how could that make sense?). Think of that and how this one-sided criticism of "you should do that to avoid a certain image and get things done" of yours makes no sense either - it didn't scare anyone who would ever: currently only Motorola. Edit: adding to the last point, the same applies to Fairphone but inversely, where they portray themselves as things they are not (sustainable, specially repairable, ethical, even privacy-respecting). Whereas a takeaway from your comment is that GrapheneOS is good but has a negative image (a false premise, in my opinion), Fairphone puts a lot of *effort* to construct a good image that signals the inverse of what they are. Effort ultimately signals intention.

dataflow 1mo ago

Can someone explain why in 2026 we have artificial limits like this? > expandable upto 2TB with microSD I get that 2TB ought to be enough for everybody, but why the heck shouldn't a 4TB microSD Just Work?

Pfhortune 1mo ago
Every time I've seen a card capacity limit like this, someone tries a bigger card and it just... works.
Telaneo 1mo ago
They just haven't tested anything larger.
Velocifyer 1mo ago
The SDXC spec does not allow for cards bigger than 2TiB, because of address sizes. You need SDUC for above 4TB.

Pfhortune 1mo ago

Disappointed they don't have a wireless-charging-enabled backplate. And I was just about ready to pull the trigger... I know wireless charging is wasteful... but I've got magsafe pucks everywhere in the house/car now... Let me have this one thing...

ConanRus 1mo ago

[dead]

vazark 1mo ago

My gripe is the lack of usb 3 / dp-alt support. Fairphone as a whole feels like a company that prioritises the mission, but only this mission of ethical and reusable hardware. The user experience for power users who are most likely to recommend their devices feels like a let-down.

abdullahkhalids 1mo ago

[flagged]

maxglute 1mo ago

How is the OS?

bitwize 1mo ago

grapheneos when?

deleted 1mo ago
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deleted 1mo ago
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grapheneos 1mo ago
Fairphones have awful updates, privacy and security. They don't provide crucial hardware-based security features needed to have working encryption for the vast majority of users not using a strong passphrase. They don't provide what's required to have decent protection from remote attacks either. Their devices don't provide important driver and firmware updates we need to have for each supported device. Fairphones end up with an end-of-life Linux kernel branch after a couple years and have never migrated to a new one. Fairphone has a very close partnership with Murena and replaced their own open source OS with /e/. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and isn't useful to regular people. They've heavily propagated false claims about the usability, compatibility, privacy and security provided by GrapheneOS. These years of inaccurate claims have resulted in many people being misled about GrapheneOS and have done immense harm to it. /e/ and Murena have even repeatedly claimed private and secure devices in general primarily benefit criminals and pedophiles: https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie... https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142 https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142 Murena is explicitly not on the side of people wanting protection from authoritarian surveillance by governments. Fairphone supported Murena's inaccurate claims when contacted by the media and their employees regularly participate in it. This is what they choose to market as private and secure: https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603 https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603
- teekert 1mo ago
  [flagged]

g8425 1mo ago

I purchased a Fairphone 6 thinking I was going to solve a lot of issues I had with more popular phone models. This has not been the case. I think that when all is said and done, Fairphone will have done more to hurt the concept of device repairability than help it. Examples: Within a month of purchase, the little upper speaker grill/mesh sticker fell out. Now this is why I bought a Fairphone - a few clicks, a few days wait and a few screws later and I can easily replace it... not the case. They wanted me to warranty/send in my phone for a sticker replacement on "the world's most repairable phone." Not a great first impression. Another system update they shipped bricked my sim card. No support, no help, just me with a permanent fear of installing any updates in the future.

Ferret7446 24d ago
A lot of people forget that "right to repair" means that YOU fix it. There is no silver bullet. You can either rely on a company to fix it for you and not screw you over, or you can do all of the work of sourcing parts and labor, and if you mess up the repair then you own the pieces.

fuckinpuppers 1mo ago

Love this idea but carrier limitations, eSIM limitations, kind of an odd start. I am sure it’s licensing and radio costs or limitations. But I would assume anything launching nowadays would support esims 100% and could jump networks without an issue.