Gear News This Week: The Repairable Fairphone 6 Arrives and Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked Is Up Next
Plus: Dell officially replaces the XPS brand, Cambride Audio budget buds, and an HDMI buying boon. Courtesy of Cambridge Audio; Dell
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The sixth generation of Fairphone arrived this week, featuring a modular design built to last from ethically sourced components in a climate-conscious way. It has been a couple of years since its predecessor, the Fairphone 5, and the Fairphone 6 is refreshingly smaller and lighter.
It boasts a 6.3-inch OLED screen with a 120-Hz adaptive refresh rate, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 processor, and a 4,415 mAh battery that Fairphone says is good for up to two days. You also get a 50-megapixel main camera with a 13-MP ultrawide lens and a 32-MP selfie camera.
Fairphone says the new device is made with more than 50 percent fair and recycled materials, including cobalt sourced through the Fair Cobalt Alliance, fair gold, silver, and tungsten, and recycled aluminum and rare earth metals. The Fairphone 6 is 100 percent e-waste neutral, made in factories powered by 100 percent renewable energy, by people paid a living wage.
The Fairphone 6 is an Android phone with Google Gemini onboard, but the Fairphone Moments feature enables you to hit a physical switch for a minimalist mode with a pared-back interface and just five apps. Fairphone has always gone for a modular design to make repairs and upgrades easier, but this time, it includes a swappable accessory range with a case, card holder, lanyard, and finger loop. Despite the modular design, the Fairphone 6 has an IP55 rating.
The Fairphone 6 comes with a five-year warranty, software support until 2033 (eight years is more than any other Android manufacturer promises), and a guarantee of seven major Android OS upgrades. Sadly, it's still not officially sold in the US, but you can buy one for £499 in the UK or 599 Euros on the continent. If you are interested and live in the US, there's a de-Googled version of the Fairphone 6 running e/OS, coming in August. Too bad it costs $899. — Simon Hill Dell Kills the XPS Brand
XPS is finally dead. Oh, you didn't hear? Dell announced the sweeping rebrand earlier this year, but perhaps its most iconic laptop branding hasn't changed in the past six months. No new XPS models have come out, so the laptop line has been cruising along. But now, Dell's ambitious (and sometimes downright confusing) rebranding efforts have reached XPS, the beloved laptops that have been setting the standard for premium Windows laptops for many years. In place of what would've been the new Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16, the company is launching the Dell Premium 14 and Dell Premium 16. It doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same.
Aside from the name, this is a modest upgrade over last year's models. The new laptops use the latest Intel chips (Core Ultra 200H series) and Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics. Intel's new chips claim to provide better battery life—up to 27 hours on the Dell Premium 16—whereas the RTX 5050, 5060, and 5070 will improve the graphics. The Dell Premium 14 starts at $1,650, which is $50 cheaper than what it launched at last year.
Meanwhile, the Dell Premium 16 will only launch with the RTX 5070 model, with other configurations to come later. While the designs remain as sleek as ever, the fact that both models start with only a 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution screen feels crazy at that price, especially when stretched out on a 16.3-inch screen. Let's not forget: The 14-inch MacBook Pro has a lower starting price and comes with a high-resolution Mini-LED screen on all models. Prices tend to fluctuate, though, and I'm happy Dell is keeping these creator-based machines with discrete graphics options around. I'll hopefully be testing them soon, but for now, let's pour one out for XPS, an iconic PC brand that's been around since the early 1990s—one of the last holdouts from a wildly different era in technology. — Luke Larsen Solos' New Smart Glasses Embrace AI
Smart glasses are taking off in various forms, but Solos sees them as wearable AI devices. Both its new models, the AirGo A5 and the AirGo V2, offer access to an AI assistant. The AirGo A5 relies on audio, with built-in speakers and microphones enabling you to access SolosChat to reply to messages or pose queries. You can also use them for calls or to listen to music and podcasts.
The more interesting AirGo V2 packs a 16-megapixel camera and a more advanced version 3.0 of SolosChat that combines ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek to identify objects, translate text, and provide the answers you need. Like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, you can also use them to snap photos and shoot videos hands-free.
To compete with the best smart glasses, the AirGo V2 will have to improve considerably on the original Solos AirGo Vision glasses, which had a very poor quality camera and were downright clunky. Solos has also released an SDK and is partnering with companies like Envision and Deutsche Telekom to develop useful AI-driven apps to make AI smart glasses more useful and appealing. The Solos AirGo A5 costs $249, with preorders starting in August. The AirGo V2 glasses will cost $299 but aren't expected to launch until the end of the year. — Simon Hill Cambridge Audio Melomania A100 Are Compact and Affordable Wireless Buds Courtesy of Cambridge Audio
If you are looking for a pair of wireless noise cancelling earbuds at the more affordable end of the market, British hi-fi brand Cambridge Audio has just thrown a new contender into the mix with its Melomania A100. Following on from last year's M100 buds, the A100 offer a more compact and lightweight design, but with plenty of the brand's hi-fi heritage still built in. The A100 borrow things like the Class AB amplification from its CX and EX Series to help power the buds' 10mm Neodymium drivers, and have a seven-band adjustable EQ for tweaking sound to your taste.
The buds also provide all manner of ways to get your music to them in the best possible quality, including support for LDAC and aptX Lossless and Adaptive, and Cambridge's proprietary DynamEQ looks to keep things sounding exciting, even at low volumes. There are also touch controls here, IPX5 waterproofing and Bluetooth 5.4 multipoint for connecting to two devices.
As far as battery life goes, you'll get 6.5 hours of ANC playback from a single charge, and up to 28 more hours from the case—plus three hours playback from 10 minutes on charge. That's down a few hours down on last year's model, but the price reflects that. You'll be able to pick these up now in the UK and Europe for £119/€139 and they will be available in the US a bit later in 2025 in for $149. — Verity Burns Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked Gets a Date
Nothing is set to debut its flagship Nothing Phone (3) early next week in London, but in the following week Samsung will take the stage in Brooklyn to take the wraps off its latest folding phones and smartwatches. This week, the company announced the official date for its second Galaxy Unpacked event of the year—July 9—with the keynote to begin at 10 am ET or 7 am Pacific. As usual, it will be livestreamed.
We're expecting to see the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Z Flip7 folding smartphones, along with the Galaxy Watch8 series. Samsung already lets you reserve the device now, and in return, you'll get $50 in Samsung store credit and a chance to win a $5,000 credit for Samsung's store. HDMI Cables Get Clearer
HDMI 2.2 isn't something that most people need to worry about right now; it's the upcoming video display standard that will likely be utilized by professionals first. Still, it's worth noting that you will be able to tell which cables are HDMI 2.2 compatible thanks to a new 'Ultra96' label on all cables.
This label is designed to tell buyers that it supports the full 96 Gbps bandwidth HDMI 2.2 is capable of. First revealed at CES 2025, the new standard will be slow to roll out at home because there isn't any 96 Gbps video for anyone to stream from anything, but support for up to 16K resolution (4K is the current standard) leaves a lot of breathing room down the line. — Parker Hall
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