There’s some good point’s here, even the articles author seems to have doubt’s as to the validity of such devices where updates are concerned.
Putting all those aside for a moment, to me the silver lining is the ability to easily swap out a failing battery or charging port, especially if your a ham-fisted user who regularly rams the connection in. I’ve had no end of these fail over the years and more often than not, simply disposed of the device.
The other thing I miss from back in the day was the ability to disconnect the battery when a device gets frozen, it’s not resolving the underling issue but a great way to get things up and running again.
This is not really directly comparable to those older designs (or the Fairphone). It’s more of a middle-ground - you still need to undo multiple screws and use a prying tool to gain access to the battery, so it’s not something you can do anywhere or in a handful of seconds like you could with older models. You don’t get particularly great dust or water proofing for these inconveniences either (reminder that the Galaxy S5, which is over 10 years older than these phones, had an IP67 rating with a back cover and battery that could be removed in seconds with your hands).
The issue isn’t the software has limited support, the issue is the software doesn’t get open sourced when support ends.
HMD also doesn’t provide any mechanism for unlocking the bootloader
This is the part that’s inexcusable.
Almost pulled the trigger on a Skyline, but then read about the bootloader not being unlockable, and hmd “promising” to make it unlockable at a later time. That’s bullshit right there - if you offer only 2 years of software support you better make the bootloader unlockable, otherwise it’s e-waste.
I recall ASUS doing something similar with the Zenfone 10 and then never following through.
