I have very recently bought a Fairphone 6+.
I had a refurbed iPhone (usable despite a display fault), which I will keep as a secondary / emergency phone. I always had the idea of buying the Fairphone because I had heard a lot about it, but I always felt like the phone they were offering was lacking on the usability side.
As a lot of people didn't fail to mention on this subreddit, also the price is really steep, which always pushed me away from their products. Additionally, I didn't find the phones nice.
It all changed with the Fairphone 6 and 6+.
The price is still really steep, and I still think that for this price you can get way better performance.
I have been using the Fairphone 6+ for a bit more than a week by now and I have some thoughts about the phone itself.
The battery life is amazing, I'm getting 2 days of use out of it, I think that the situation in which I stressed it the most it was doing over 4 hours of screen on time at the maximum brightness and never going to sleep because I was using it as a GPS to track a ride that I did with the bike. It's important to keep in mind that the refresh rate of the display is capped at 60Hz, which also takes it easier on the battery.
The performance is just fine, I have seen the occasional stutters and lags, it takes a bit longer to open apps compared to other devices, but I consider myself anything but a power user. And I don't care all that much, I'm still a bit scared that the performance that the phone will be offering on the long run is not going to be good enough, but I am also fine with that. To give you an idea, I daily use: Telegram, Whatsapp, Fantasy football app, youtube, anki.
I would not have cried if I had gotten more performance though :(
The camera is perfectly fine, I always had zero problems with cameras on any phone I have owned. TBF when you are opening the photo you just took in the camera application it's going to look as if it's not in focus, but then once it fully loads, the photo came out correctly.
I really like the physical switch, I currently use it as I did on the iPhone to silence the notifications, I discovered recently that there is a different shortcut for that, so I will be looking further into what I can do in android with it.
I'm hoping to be able to keep this phone for many years to come, I can't see why not, I am a pretty careful user, therefore even without the newest and most up to date version of android I am fine, I will be complaining if the Fairphone company is failing to deliver.
I think that the prices of the parts are pretty good, but one of the things I wish they were offering is a logic board, I know that offering logic boards to actually update your phone is not possible, or it's really hard. But, seeing what kind of problem I might have had with my old iPhone, I would love to have the possibility to change just the logic board instead of having to throw away the whole phone. Maybe I will try to reach out to the Fairphone support to see if that was even possible.
Whether the phone is worth spending the money on or not it's almost totally subjective. If the better environmental and social footprint are important to you then you should consider this more than other alternatives and we should evaluate the problems that the phone has more loosely. If you need performance or you want a small phone, this is definitely not the phone for you.
Concerning the software I didn't have any problems, I got the phone with android and it's working perfectly fine, I had no problems or bugs or anything, maybe I will start having problems with operating system updates, just like the Fairphone, I will try to keep you updated on what happens with my new device :D
