it's a sad day when repairability is a feature
Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This seems highly complementary to repairability -- both seem important to maximize useful life -- and thus an entirely fair point, no? Repairability is more that once you buy it, you actually own it. Apple does not support this model. Real repairability is when you can hack all components of hardware and software in your domain (which precludes hacking against cell towers, ISP telecom equipment, etc.).
Nor do most Android vendors.
Correct, though that isn't concomitant to the point under discussion.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#403I'm happy about this! But, while repairability is always great, a major (maybe the biggest) part of phone obsolescence is due to software. 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8. The best hope here is that this phone's repairability will attract a software hacking community to provide inofficial updates, but what a terrible thing to have to rely on. Besides: Phones by other brands like Pocophone are p…
> 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8. Saying an iPhone can handle 8 generations of iOS updates is a bigger joke. I’m a cheapskate that somehow uses Apple phones, and I’ll let you know after 2-3 major OS updates the performance is always severely diminished.
No. Your phone becomes damaged (DRAM and flash and performance problems due to battery) but the phone itself usually is fine.
I just got a whole new phone out of a failed battery replacement for my iphone 8+ - my guess is the OS installation was just too damaged to accept the battery pairing process and it just flaked out, it was bootlooping and refusing to charge the battery. I got a refurbished 8+ in consideration, and it's actually great despite being a 5.5 year old release at this point. It's not the actual performance level of the phone itself that's the problem, they just tend to become worn out at a hardware level and the phone tends to become unstable. It was showing all kinds of weird software quirks (discord "send" button would fail to appear when posting a meme despite the image being in the send box, and you'd have to tab back and forth to a different server before the "send" button would show up, etc) and all of that vanished as soon as I got a new phone.
While I can't prove it, my opinion is it would have come back over time even if I did a factory reset, perhaps even worse. Because I had the same experience with my previous phone, an Android Moto G first-gen (Falcon), which I owned for just about 5 years exactly (early 2014-early 2019). The phone simply got more and more unstable due to bad flash/RAM and perhaps some glitching caused by the weak battery... first I'd have to factory reset once in a while, then the whole OS would need to be reflashed, finally the installs were being corrupted less than a day after a clean reflash.
The practical lifespan of the DRAM/flash in a phone seems to be about 3-4 years in my experience and by the time things hit 5 years they are so damaged they are unusable even after fresh OS installs/etc. The timeframe is identical for both my Moto G and the 8+, I bet if I'd continued to use the same handset for another year it'd have started corrupting itself even after a factory reset/etc. I don't know why that would be - whether phones are writing certain flash cells too much and they're burning out, or what. Obviously PC SSDs and DRAM can be fine for a decade.
I am very onboard with some degree of refurbishment being a critical element of long-term phone repair after these experiences. They start to go janky at 3 years, by 4 years it is becoming a problem, and by 5 years it is unusable. Even with clean software installs (factory resets or OS image reflashes), it just is not stable. The Moto G I could write off as a fluke, it was a cheap phone to begin with, maybe it was just janky. The 8+ failing in the exact same ways on a very similar timeline (about 6-12 months later due to higher hardware quality) says to me that DRAM or flash is just wearing out over time. If it was just battery performance problems then it wouldn't have failed to re-pair after a fresh battery was installed either.
Again, now that I've got a refurbished 8+ in like new condition, I can tell you it's still perfectly fine as a phone/piece of hardware, it's more than fine enough to run discord and apollo and gmail and banking and all the other things I do day-to-day. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's a particular unit becoming worn and failing.
This also goes to show the importance of long-term software support... I have basically a new handset on 5.5 year old hardware. It will probably be 10 years old before I retire it. iOS is insanely good about that, I am still receiving full software updates at this point, although probably not for that much longer. Show me an Android phone with 6-7 years of feature updates, please. Most androids won't even get security updates for half of that. That is what keeps the e-waste down. I'm sure my handset will be diagnosed and refurbished and sent out to someone else for replacement too, or sent to APMA region for those customers, the circle of life.
I paid $725 for the phone originally (refurb) and $49 for the replacement, and I just got my third otterbox commuter for the replacement case, probably will kill a 4th one over the life of this handset too. So all-up I am expecting to be around $900 for all hardware expenditures for this phone for 9-10 years. Not too awful overall.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#404Wow HN. I really interesting new product comes out, a really interesting turn in the right to repair debate, and a return of a famous brand. And instead of talking about that, there are a series of threads about how an iphone costing 5 times as much and is famously difficult to repair is a better phone than this. Get a grip! Can we not have a least one conversation without Apple fanbois wading in?
Thats like the recent thread where someone asked for a good Linux laptop, and the top comment was to buy a mac. I'll never understand this brand loyalism/consumer mentality, and to what lengths Apple folks will go to promote, justify, and defend their purchase decisions.
I'm not going to wade into this flamewar but I will say one thing. Apple is what it says on the tin. It's a curated garden that mostly just works. At a certain point in your life and your career you don't have weekends to spare on side projects and, especially in the tools that you use the most to interact with the Internet (phone, laptop) you want it to work the first time. I've flirted with Linux and for what it is, it's great, but I'm mostly done with hunting down drivers not working. Apple gives me my time back.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats like the recent thread where someone asked for a good Linux laptop, and the top comment was to buy a mac. I'll never understand this brand loyalism/consumer mentality, and to what lengths Apple folks will go to promote, justify, and defend their purchase decisions.
I don’t get it. Why a Mac cannot be a good Linux laptop?
I think you'd have to be willing to be extremely enthusiastic dealing with all the shortcomings of the experimental support currently. Maybe older MacBooks are somewhat supported, but the ARM (Asahi Linux) is alpha right now, and a lot of stuff simply isn't implemented.
There's also some individual differences, i.e. from what I've heard you won't ever be able to run something like the Xen Hypervisor as Apple didn't fully implement the Arm spec s.t. some opcodes are missing.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#406Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. My local bank requires 9 or above >Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still. It's not uncommon at all for banks to have a website that's virtually impossible to use on mobile browsers.
Even at 9, thats supported from devices bought in 2016 or later. Who's battery lasts > 6-7 years?
> Who's battery lasts > 6-7 years?
I think the relevant question is whose phone lasts 6-7 years? Because you might well replace the battery a couple times over the life of the phone and that's fine.
Anyway I just got a whole new iphone 8+ out of a failed battery replacement and it was showing all kinds of OS and application glitches, just as the moto G I had before it did too. The flash and DRAM doesn't last forever, the practical lifespan of the handset itself is about 3 years for complete stability, 4 years for moderate glitchiness, and 5 years for complete unusability, same pattern across both phones.
But yes, this means I will be using a 2017 phone for another 4 years, so the software lifespan probably needs to be close to a decade, and Android's lifespan is absurdly far from that level.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they seriously lock the bootloader of a "repairable" phone? That's the most important feature for me, which has prolonged the life of all my Android devices by several years.
As long as there's a way to unlock it, does it matter? Do it once and it's done forever.
I think you’re misunderstanding the Android bootloader model. All the Android phones I saw when researching one to buy came with locked bootloaders, even the easily-unlocked Google Pixel series. So it’s not even a question whether the bootloader will arrive unlocked. What differentiates models is whether “there’s a way to unlock it” – plenty of models don’t support any such way. (I didn’t consider some classes of Android phones in my research of which to buy, so this could be a faulty generalization.)
The parent comments weren’t specific about whether this phone’s bootloader can be unlocked, but when they talk about this phone’s locked bootloader, I think unlockability is the issue they are really talking about.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats like the recent thread where someone asked for a good Linux laptop, and the top comment was to buy a mac. I'll never understand this brand loyalism/consumer mentality, and to what lengths Apple folks will go to promote, justify, and defend their purchase decisions.
I'm not going to wade into this flamewar but I will say one thing. Apple is what it says on the tin. It's a curated garden that mostly just works. At a certain point in your life and your career you don't have weekends to spare on side projects and, especially in the tools that you use the most to interact with the Internet (phone, laptop) you want it to work the first time. I've flirted with Linux and for what it is…
I got the Nokia G-100 about a month ago for less than 200 USD and it worked fine out of the box. In fact I would say it worked better out of the box then my partner’s iphone mini. My nokia has a headphone jack, it came with a charger with the correct ports etc. My partner on the other hand had to immediately purchase all the appropriate dongles and chords to fit the proprietary ports.
Re: Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
#410Wow SDCard and 3.5mm headphone jack. Very nice.