As the title says, the mainboard of my phone broke and repairing it would cost more than a new one. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'd like to be able to change the battery, if possible. Thanks for any help in advance.
I asked the same thing a few months ago and got a lot of good advice. Good luck!
There was a battery changing thread a while back. The Motorola phone with a clip in battery seems okay. Moto e6.
I want to try to persuade you against that choice though. You’re giving up size, water resistance and durability for what might be dubious benefit. If you need extended use, usb battery banks do that better than replacement batteries. If you’re worried about privacy a better option is to stow the phone somewhere else. If you want to not be out of luck when the battery inevitably gives up the ghost, use a phone repair place. They’re almost universally doing battery and screen replacements for the cost of parts plus damn near minimum wage labor. Seriously, it’s worth looking at the prices in your area especially if you’re near a college.
If you really truly plan on keeping the phone until it needs a new mainboard, consider getting a screwdriver set and doing the work yourself. If you stay with big name manufacturers it’s easy to find parts long after the phone is dead. I’d still stay away from Xaiomi for a few years though. The third party replacement parts channel can dip into gimmie tablet level bad for them.
If you are set on android and don’t plan on immediately rooting it, have a care for what you can back up with just normal access to the user files directory. The support window on almost all non-google/Samsung devices is very short and you’ll be doing good to get two major versions of the os.
E: had a little time and some more thoughts surfaced.
we might have similar use cases. do you usually keep the phone until it's unrepairable? what region are you in? do you already have marketplace lock in on android or ios?
Thanks for your help. I usually keep phones till I can't anymore. I always had android phones, so I guess I am locked in. I live in the EU. I like rooting phones, but mostly for fun. I mainly use them to read, theory and enterntainment, and to listen to podcasts.
As long as you’re not in the Russian sphere of influence and don’t expect to be targeted by state actors, it’s worth it to at least look into ios devices. The parts availability and very long support window make em a no brainer in the us, but things are different depending on where in the eu a person is.
Seriously. I have no love for apple the company but I handle a lot of phones working on em and they’re usually the better choice if a person can get away with it. Part of it is the install base, part of it is the sheer volume of devices out there, part of it is the relatively small number of different ones and part of it is that their higher “real” and perceived value. The closest analogy I can think of is this: my local transmission shop does much more work on f150s than Kia’s.
If you expect to deal with the police do not get a phone with face unlocking except apple or Samsung. Even if you don’t plan on using it. Those two brands use multiple cameras to authenticate and hardware to secure the stored secrets so even if your phone gets attacked successfully the attacker can’t authenticate as you using that biometric data. You need both because multiple cameras means the attacker can’t use a picture to fake it out and hardware storage means they can’t use a software man in the middle attack to fool it (they can use a hardware man in the middle attack though, or just point the phone at your face).
You talked about dual sim in another comment and unless you specifically need SIM cards, like, your work is going to give you a sim and will explicitly not use esim, most of the time it’s gonna be done through carrier esim provision. Esim is where they just push the data for the network to your device through the network. You can have as many esims as you like on most devices, so the limit is your radio region. Some people will say that SIM card is more secure because you can take them out, but the phone doesn’t need a sim to use the network, just to authenticate with the carrier and idk of any phones that do cards but not esim which can be pushed out by the carrier anyway so there’s not really that layer of security.
It’s possible that your carrier only does card sim and won’t do esim but idk.
You also talked about microsd in another comment and that’s still available but less common. Probably by the time we each get anew phone it’ll be removable battery level. If you end up getting one with it think on how you’re gonna back up your data when it’s gone.
If you have a pair of corded headphones you like, don’t unnecessarily narrow your choices by looking for a 1/8” jack. The adapter cables work great and having a “safe” break point in the wire is something I wish we’d carried over from minidisc.
E: a little more on the 1/8”/3.5mm jack: I hated giving that up at first too, but a bunch of stuff I had been doing with it actually got better when it went away. Normal listening with corded headphones uses an adapter cable, and it’s nice to have that break point for when the line gets snagged. I never saw any quality drop, but there’s always the dedicated dac for using a phone on the stereo. They make some really good recording I/o breakout boxes and I’m not even restricted to the bandwidth of the phones audio interface for using the phone as a little improvised scope if I use one of those (be careful doing this).
e2: a little bit on the possible upcoming eu replaceable battery rules: it's probably not worth it to just get something that'll tide you over until the new eu battery regulations come into effect in the hopes that you get a sweet new phone with a replaceable battery. all phone manufacturers have gotten frankly fantastic at making waterproof devices and they did it by having no big multi-use gaskets. a replaceable battery is gonna be that exact type of seal and the first few are gonna suck for a few reasons. they're gonna be figuring out how to design em and manufacture em and still meet customers' expectations of being able to drop the thing in the toilet, make calls in a downpour, etc. they're gonna be figuring out exactly how good of a job they have to do at a variety of battery and device attributes to have the phone and battery last long enough to maintain brand reputation, and they're gonna be actively working to change users expectations to match what they can make and have brought to market.
for people like you and i who use phones as long as we possibly can before replacing them, this is the exact wrong time to jump on new models with replaceable batteries. best to stick with existing models with replaceable batteries or ones without em and get the tools to do the job. i tend towards that second category after experiences just like yours with the fairphone.
no more edits now.
Thanks for your amazing answer, first of all. I have an ancient sim with a good contract that has now survived 3 phones that I will keep and I need the other slot because I cross borders often for personal reasons, I should look into e-sims.
Cop security did not really factor into my choice, since I already fucked up if my phone is with me when I expect to get into trouble with them.
The point with the headphone jack is great, and considering how often I accidentially ripped them off, I could consider getting a dongle even with jack. It's worth some thought.
I deally I would grow old with my new phone and have it buried with me, but since that will never happen I will have to hope that by the time of it's final death replacable batteries have advanced enough for your advice to no longer apply.
What's your budget? Do you have any requirements? What do you do with your phone?
I read a lot on my phone. I guess my budget is sub 500€ preferably less. Important are dual-sim and sd-card space. Secondary are replacable battery and 3.5 mm headphone jack. Edit: My last phone came with root access unlocked, that was very nice for installing open source stuff.
Xiaomi Redmi
Damn. Wish I'd known about this before I got my OnePlus. Way nicer and a couple hundred bucks cheaper, too.
OnePlus has been the premium Oppo line as of a few years, instead of the best bang-for-your-buck flagship killer they were known to be, I can't recommend them anymore in good faith.
My current 300 dollar OnePlus8T blows away my previous 300 dollar Xiaomi Redmi
I just didn't recommend it to them because they wanted a micro SD slot
I think for budget phones, OnePlus you have to get old flagships and Xiaomi get the newer redmis
Thank you very much for your recommendations. Yeah Micro Sd is important to me, because I like to hoard MP3s and reading material.
The Xiaomi website claims that the storage on the 12 pro is extendable with a micro-sd. Every other site in existence claims the opposite, do you know which one is true?
I think it depends on which version you get, like China, international, EU, etc.
I like GSMArena to check for specs for specific models
Thanks, I am looking at it. Apparently it is easy to get root access for it, which is anice plus. Now I only need to figure out how to pay for it, since my E-Banking also needs a phone to work.
Check out Poco F5 Pro, also pretty poggers will last for years due to custom roms
Ngl all phones suck massive ass. Fairphone is ok if you want your phone to be user serviceable but they're far from being nice phones to actually use. But at least they aren't designed to be ewaste at the point of sale.
I used to have a fairphone 3 actually, that's the one that died. Liked being able to replace, almost, everything. But right now it's a bit too expensive for me. Back then I had a better paying job. Thanks for the tip though.
Ah that sucks, didn't know the mainboards cost as much at the phone it feels like thats antithetical to what they were trying to achieve. Alas capitalism finds a way to ruin everything i guess.
They don't even sell the mainboards, so I would need to solder it myself or buy a new one.
That sucks more than I ever knew. Only Nokia could save us but they were gutted and now exist in name only
The EU is mandating new phones sold I think next year need to have replaceable batteries so here's to hoping that we may potentially also be able to get new phones with replaceable batteries (not holding my breath tho lol)
FX-Tec pro 1has replaceable batteries, so does the Fairphone* The new one doesn't
Depends on budget, ideally you'd want something with a high refresh rate display and 4 big/high performance cores on the CPU, and with a Snapdragon chipset instead of MediaTek or Exynos. The mail GPUs in those chipsets are missing key driver features. Dual source blending implementation being a key missing feature if you emulate games on your phone. They also generally have worse battery life. The cheapest phone I could find with all these features is the Xiaomi Redmi note 12 4g, for around 160US dollars.
If you want more performance and premium features, like better cameras, faster chipset, 5g, etc, getting last year's flagships on a stock clearance discount is always a great option. But they will be a bit more expensive. It's what I did about 3 years ago and my phone is still going strong.
I've used a Google phone for the last couple that I've bought and been pretty happy with it, a last-generation one would still be really slick and pretty cheap but the flagship ones are great. I really wish there was a full-keyboard phone like the old Motorola Droids, which remains my favorite phone form factor ever, but sadly all of the options out there are either ancient, really sketchy quality, or big enough to be a small laptop.
I've got a Xiaomi 11T, it runs like a dream and was pretty cheap compared to similarly speced phones.
It's also a really pretty opalescent color
