About 6 montha ago I wanted to replace my S21 battery and checked with Samsung, who redirected me to iFixit. The only genuine Samsung S21 battery they had was only sold with the screen, which cost ~$130 or something. I didn’t need the screen…
Last month I checked again and saw they had a third party replacement battery for ~$30, same capacity. I bought it and popped it in. It’s been working fine.
Was it Samsung’s requirement that the battery only be sold with the screen? At the time, I would have rather had the genuine Samsung battery and would have paid a bit extra for it, but not $100 extra.
Starting June 2024, iFixit will no longer be Samsung’s designated third-party parts and tools distributor. Also starting next month, we will no longer have a quantity limit of seven Samsung parts per repair shop per quarter.
Wow that is quite a limit Samsung. I can see why no one would want to be a partner with them. (Which was obviously the point.)
Reading this from a Fairphone 3 that received a new battery and a new headphone jack three weeks ago (and which were both extremely easy to install).
They don’t? That’s interesting. Well, I guess I’ll go with google next time and flash it?
That’s what my research suggests, it doesn’t get a good signal in Canada because it’s missing some of our bands.
Google phones still don’t solve the repairability problem for me, but a Pixel with Graphene flashed onto it is theoretically the best thing for your privacy.
Let’s all buy Fairphones. I know they’re expensive. But it’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message.
I would rather buy nokia with ifixit partnership and save hundreds of euros. for me it’s about the money 700€ is a shit ton of money
edit: okay after looking moreninto nokia phones (or hmd phones, maker of current nokias) I would propably hold my money until they release something new and good which isnt too expensive, currently their lineup is a bit weird. but they do make the phones mostly from recycled materials and I like the idea of that company. (mostly cuz it’s finnish and even stores the data in finland so no china involved)
Yeah, roll one out with a 5.8" screen and a headphone jack amd I’ll buy it at a premium. I’d shell out even more for a true iPhone mini-sized phone if they make the battery fat enough for decent battery life – small phones can still be ergonomic and light enough with a little extra chonk.
Giant screen, no headphone jack? No thanks, I might as well buy a $50 android phone at a gas station.
It’s not just about the cost though. They’re inferior to pretty much any other mid-range or high-end smartphone too. Expensive but good would be fine. Cheap and mediocre would be fine. Expensive and mediocre though? Nah.
My £250 used phone has a faster processor, more RAM, better screen (higher resolution, brighter, bigger and higher frame rate), and a higher capacity battery with faster charging. It’s a mid-range Xiaomi from a couple years ago, not a high end or flagship phone.
They should take notes from pinephone. Offers something unusual at a low cost. Since enthusiasts eat that stuff up you get extra help with software and ROMs too. Yes it’s low spec, but it’s good enough for enthusiasts to play with and is of good value as the price reflects the quality.
Well, yeah… Xiaomi is a Chinese phone! Why do you think it’s so cheap and more powerful?
Unless Fairphone also uses Chinese labor?
Plenty of other brands which aren’t Chinese are both better and cheaper. Samsung, Apple, Google, Asus even.
Do they all use cheap Chinese labour? Sure. Do you actually think Fair phone doesn’t? Even if they somehow completely avoid China for the whole supply chain, they will inevitably get cheap labour from somewhere - like Taiwan or Costa Rica. After all they are using standard Qualcomm parts, so that’s going to be either TSMC in Taiwan or Samsung in China and Korea.
According to their own website their living wage bonus is only $2.63. It doesn’t even say if that’s per hour or per day.
I mean if you keep a FP5 for it’s entire service life it’s actually a pretty damn cheap phone. If all goes well maybe a couple of battery changes tops.
For real. Fuck samsung so hard. I can’t even get an oem replacement battery for my N20 Ultra. (I bought it used in early 2021). Managed to find one (battery) that appeared new and genuine from ebay about 2 years ago, but im going to need another in the next year or so, because there’s no replacement phone with a pen and a micro sd card slot beyond this one. Almost no phones with just the SD card slot.
It sucks that it’s hard to find MicroSD slots, but when you can get 512 GB onboard and just dump it to a USB drive, it’s basically just a matter of semantics at that point.
I go places a lot of times with sketch internet connections and have a huge digital library I keep stored on my phone. Not to mention all the pictures and videos I take (and video recordings take up quite a large chunk of space). Then you get into, ok, I can pay $400 for this phone so it has 512GB instead of 128GB. That sucks when you can buy a 1,000GB card for less than $100.
So why do I need to spend so much more money to get something that should be so ridiculously cheap?
What are you doing to it to need 2 battery replacements in four years, I have a Note20 Ultra 5G bought at release, still using the original battery. Battery health is estimated to still be over 90%
