All right. What are we looking at today, Taran? >> Still the Fair Phone. And in conclusion,
you may want to buy this one or you may not. >> In my review a year and a half ago, I
described the Fair Phone 5 as a fair
phone. Not a great phone, but a fair phone. The co-founder took that
personally, issuing a response that came right out of the Lionus Sebastian
textbook for How to Handle Criticism. >> Thank you, Lionus. They fired me. With
that said, there are some fair points
that he made about his phone and some fair points that he acknowledged that I
made. And I'm hoping that the Fairphone 6 is going to find a middle ground
between well, the sustainability, not to
mention ethical production as well as longevity that they're promising and the
day-to-day usability that I'm asking for. Ooh, it includes a cute little iix
it screwdriver with inhandle bit
storage. Uh, did it only come with the one bit? That, yeah, makes sense. I
mean, if it's the only one you need, it's the only one you need, baby. Kind of spins almost as good as the top of
the LT precision screwdriver from ltstore.com.
It does make their point really well that a major focus of the Fairphone 6
and in fact of every Fairphone is on repairability and sustainability
allowing any of the 12 major components that can be replaced in this phone can
be done with just one screwdriver bit.
Super cool. Ooh, you know what else is cool? Modular interfaces.
this little siliconey style card holder.
Little something like that. And also this finger loop.
Very cool. Hey, look. Braille on the packaging. You like to see it? Or well,
feel it. I'm not fluent in French, but is cordon de telephone really the French
term for a lanyard? And like, wow, what
is this thing? It's really big. Fashion statement maybe
or uh some other kind of statement.
Lennis, don't piss us off. Or else
there's also a protective case. Yep, that's a phone case. And as always, that
word fair is at the center of their entire design and production philosophy.
They claim that over 50% of the materials in the Fairphone 6 are fair or
recycled, that they are 100% e-waste neutral, and is built using green
energy. It includes a SIM removal tool, and if you're not a reviewer, that's
about all you get in the box. Now, we
just have to figure out if it's a phone that anybody would want to use. Right
out of the gate, I like what they've done with the ID. It's clean, and that's
good because you're going to be using this thing for a flipping long time.
Fairphone promises 8 years of software updates for security and seven major
Android iterations, which I suspect is
somewhat at the mercy of Google. Like, if Google were to switch to a once every
3ear cadence or something like that, I'm sure Fairone's not going to support this
thing for 21 years. We've got a SIM tray
at the bottom that contains a pretty cool surprise. One moment.
Look at that. See a SIM tray. And then
on the other side, where there's room in basically every phone these days, they
just choose not to put it in. Micro SD.
That's right, my friends. Instead of having costly storage upgrades, the
Fairphone comes with 256 gigs of storage. And then you can put whatever
size micro SD card you want up to like 2 terb. I think these days they go up to.
On the bottom, we have a USB 2 type-C port as well as our speaker
port and a mic port. Over on the right, we get the power button, which has a
built-in fingerprint sensor. You love to see it. As well as the Lime button. Oh,
okay. So, it's a slider. We'll have to have a look at that a little bit later.
Noise cancelling mic on the top and volume rocker over on the other side.
Oh, actually, ooh, I like the way they've done this. Normally, I'm not
that into the opposed lock button and volume button. It's nice when you're
trying to hit a shortcut like uh you know trying to take a screenshot or something like that, but it's not that
great when you're going to adjust your volume, you accidentally mash your lock button. But by having this flush, not
recessed, but flush, it's pretty easy to
landmark the volume buttons and not accidentally mash the other side. Around
on the back, we've got a 50 megapixel main camera along with a 13 megapixel
ultrawide and a depth sensor as well as a dedicated flash. And oh, the front is
where things get pretty interesting, and I'll tell you all about it after this
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and style. Like its predecessor, the Fairphone 6 features an OLED display.
But unlike its predecessor, it reaches up to 120 hertz and goes as low as 10
hertz for power savings and can reach a peak brightness that Fairphone claims is
about 1,400 nits, but from what we found actually vastly exceeds that. We saw as
high as 2,000 nits in the adaptive
display profile with auto brightness enabled, which is a very decent result
for a modern smartphone. Not class leading, but very well fair, maybe even
good. Could it be a good phone this
time? Uh, we should probably change the display profile right away before I
judge it because I can see the yellow cast that you guys are describing. That
is BH colors. Ah, yes. Thank you.
Adaptive definitely more betterer and also really appreciating the upgrade to
the 120 Hz display. Using the device
already feels snappier and I haven't even really done anything with it yet.
Which I guess brings us perfectly to one of my other
issues with the Fairphone 5 because for
me, yes, obviously it is noble and
admirable that you want to build the fairest possible device, but it has to
serve the purpose of the device in the first place. And both battery life and
performance of the Fairphone 5 were major problems that seemed to stem from
the use of a not really smartphone
oriented processor. Now, Fairphone made that decision because it offered very
long support and that was what enabled them to give a nice long software
support window. But since the Fairphone 5 was released, Qualcomm has actually
and the industry at large has come around to the idea of longer software
support. So this time around we get a Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 which okay is not
the latest and greatest flagship but it is actually a smartphone processor and
does help the Fairphone stay somewhat within spitting distance of at least a
modern budget smartphone like the CMF
phone 2 from nothing.
Yes, that is a phone that costs a third
as much. And if we put the Fairphone 6 up against something that is more price
comparable like a Samsung S24 family
phone, it really lags behind. But I
still consider this to be an upgrade, raising the question, would you really
even want to be using this 7 to 8 years from now? But hey, progress is progress.
As for the rest of the specs, we get Bluetooth 5.4LE, 4LE, Wi-Fi 6E, which,
yeah, isn't the latest gen, but I think 6E is lot for pretty much anything you
do on a smartphone, and about a 4,400 MIA battery, which
could be a sticking point for some folks, but I think what I would rather
highlight is the improvement here. Thanks to their use of a considerably
more power efficient processor, they went from about 10 hours in our media
playback battery longevity test for the Fair Phone 5 to about 15 hours. That's a
massive improvement. So, I guess we don't have to go outside and use our
phone less. We can just use our Fairphone more. That's good. Love to see
it. Not as much as we could use another phone that's still considerably behind
both of our comparison devices, the modern budget phone as well as our, you
know, generation and a half old flagship that's priced the same. But it's at
least crossing into the realm of like, yeah, I could say with a straight face
that this is an all day battery life phone. Anywh who, the reason that I
opened it up is I wanted to show you guys just how flipping easy it is to get
at the battery in this thing. Yes, it costs you a little bit of IP rating. So,
I think it's IP55. Is that correct? Meaning that it's
suitable for use in heavy rain. But
unlike a lot of modern phones that are glued shut and usually feature an IP68
rating, you're not going to be able to just hang out in the pool with this
thing and know that if it falls in, it'll probably be okay. Like, this is
it. That That's the internals. There's no seals.
It's not even that thick. Although, I feel like my perspective has been skewed
a little bit by that camping outdoorsy phone that we looked at a couple of
weeks ago. That thing was wild, dude.
And the battery is out just like that. Is that going to cost you a few milliamp
hours? Which, by the way, we need to just get rid of that as a measure of
battery capacity. Is it going to cost you a few watt hours? Yeah. But how easy
was that? That's flipping awesome. Interesting. I've been calling this the
wrong thing the whole time. You guys didn't even notice. This is not the
Fairphone 6. This is the Fairphone Gen
6. Horrible. Just call it Fairphone 6,
please. If I have to type out Gen 6 anyway, then just call it Fairphone 6.
This is like when Apple released that stupid laptop that they just called
MacBook.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Anywh who, I like this. They take a
realistic approach to what most people are going to be comfortable doing. So
instead of having, you know, every little board and ribbon cable broken out
separately, it's just battery display
top unit, the earpiece, the loudspeaker, and the USBC port can all be
interchanged individually. Great job, Fairphone. Got a broken port,
you get some, you know, some water or
sand or ear wax or whatever in there. Boom. Just pop that up.
Throw a new one in there. You are G2G.
Flipping love to see it.
Boom. Just like that. Put in a new USB port. That and the screen are going to
be your most common parts that you're going to need to replace. Speaking of the screen, I don't think I mentioned
before, it's using Corning Gorilla Glass 7i compared to Gorilla Glass 5 for the
previous fair. So, that's another nice little upgrade. Now that I've got it put
back together, let's uh pop into the camera here for Oh, wow. That's a
contrasty experience. Hold on a sec. It's worth noting
interface-wise that uh they claim like a
very stock Google experience, which can sometimes be a good thing and sometimes
be uh not as good of a thing. I personally don't love the newer style
super low density interface up here, but to each their own. Oh, wow. Okay,
that is uh very flat. Why is this so
flat? It's weird cuz like you can tell they're doing some processing to achieve
it because my my picture of that screen
is super like vibrant. It's amazing how
different the preview looks from what it actually craps out. That is some of the
least pleasing bokeh that I have ever
seen on any camera ever. See that
difference? Just taking this shot from a slightly different perspective. How
washed out the skin tones are in this one. Now for my classic Android jutter
test, um, iPhones just tend to handle video
recording a lot better, especially when panning. It it does have optical image
stabilization at least for the stills camera. So maybe the selfie camera is
really good though. It is 32 megapixels. I don't think I mentioned that before.
That's a lot of megapixels on a selfie camera.
Very usable. Am I that ruddy?
No. Are you sure? Cuz I look a little ruddy. It's worth noting that these are
the kinds of issues that only really come up in day-to-day use. So, if you're
feeling like this is a lot more positive than my coverage of the Fairphone 5 last
time around, it's probably because I was actually daily driving that thing. Some
of the things that really bothered me about it were daily use problems like um
the notifications being either completely silent, extremely loud, or
slightly less extremely loud still. So, make of that what you will. This is
meant to be an unboxing with some elements that would normally be included
in a review, but it's still an unboxing. Uh, speaking of elements included, we
did measure charging time and found that Fairones's representations were accurate
and get about a 50% charge on a 30 watt charger in under 25 minutes. We measured
22. I think that's your leafy greens right there cuz it's salad. Should be
stereo, right? Yeah, that's a pretty big earpiece speaker to not be amplified. It
is.
That is one midass speaker.
Yeah, it gets pretty loud, which is
good. Kind of makes me want to use my Bluetooth headphones. Oh, that's
something I didn't really mention earlier as we were doing the physical walkthrough in spite of having micro SD
storage, which was one of the big features that phone enthusiasts lost
over the last several years. Uh, it does not have a headphone jack. So, you will
still be stuck with either a USBC adapter or with Bluetooth headphones.
Oh, there was one more thing that I wanted to look at. The English button,
the limey one. This is what do they call
this? Moments. Basically, what you do is you you create a moment. Uh, I'm going
to call it family time. And then you decide which apps you can access during
that moment. So, I'm going to say that I
need well, I need my camera. I'm allowed to listen to music during family time.
Oh, photos, a clock, you know, so I can set game timers and whatnot. You get
five apps. Can choose a background. These are so
different from each other. And then that's it. When you're in this mode,
you're in this moment. And you can like
take pictures with your kids or you can, you know, set a timer for their video
games or you can look at photos together, but you won't be interrupted
by anything that is not for that moment. Now, the briefing points did say that I
was allowed to add specific contacts even to moments, but I'm not seeing
that. Are you guys Oh, here we go. There you go. Allowed contacts. So, you can
say only starred contacts. You can go in and determine who are your starred
contacts. So, you can even determine who is allowed to call you and interrupt
during that particular moment. Notification settings. Oh, someone who
calls multiple times, it'll allow them through because that would indicate maybe that something's an emergency,
even if they're not a starred caller. And flipping into a moment is as simple
as sliding the line button right here and flipping out is as simple as sliding
it back. Honestly, the fact that it's so
simple to slide out of a moment probably would make me less likely to actually
adhere to the things that I'm supposed to be doing in that time. But I can see
why they do it this way. The last thing you want to be is a barrier to your
customer using the device the way that they want to use it. So, it's still on
you to have the discipline to stay in
the moment. Speaking of barriers, one of
my other major criticisms of the Fairphone 5 was, of course, the price.
When you compare it to what you can get at that price point in terms of phone
functionality, it's pretty tough. It's not like they don't have a value
proposition with the whole fairer materials and the long software support,
but especially now that more mainstream devices are also offering long-term
Android support as well as security software support, that has become less
of a compelling selling point. And I think basically it comes down to um your
interest in fair materials. Um, no. Actually, one of the things that's new
with the Fairphone 6, which by the way, I'm going to continue to call it this whole Fairphone Gen 6 thing. That
doesn't work for me. Um, is that they are apparently sourcing ethical gold,
which I only recently became aware of all the mercury, like tons and tons of
mercury that's being dumped into Amazon rivers by illegal gold mining
operations. Uh, because it makes it much easier to get the gold out of um all the
the crap. It just like pulls the gold out, combines with it, and then it can
be extracted. Well, that mercury just gets like dumped into the rivers. It's
causing birth defects and infecting groundwater. It's like one of the
deadliest toxins known to man. Uh, mercury, super not cool. So, ethically
sourced gold, I'm into it. I'm also into
you subscribing to ShortCircuit.