The Fairphone 6 launched last month with an expanded modular design, a better chipset, and a larger battery compared to its predecessor. This is still no flagship Android smartphone, but its key selling point isn’t performance or battery life, it’s repairability.
Thus, you might be interested to find out what the folks over at iFixit have to say about it – after all, they’ve been championing people’s right to self-repair their devices for years, and Fairphone itself is also all about giving people that option. It’s all good news for the Fairphone 6, as iFixit has found it to be the most repairable handset yet.
So, it was awarded a perfect 10 out of 10 repairability score, something that mainstream smartphone brands can only dream of, but have never achieved. Fairphone has already made parts and repair manuals available for the Fairphone 6, which it promises will get at least seven major Android updates and at least eight years of security patches. That’s important because a phone being easy to repair is kind of pointless if its software isn’t supported past a year or two.
The entire phone uses only T5 Torx screws, so one screwdriver is enough to get to any component. Speaking of which, obviously all of the various bits and pieces are very easy to replace – this includes the battery, cameras and the screen as well as the USB port. There’s no glue anywhere inside, which makes repairs a breeze but means it can only be IP55 rated for dust and water resistance.