In a bid to reduce global electronic waste, Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves. What makes its technology so sustainable?
Batteries got harder to access, making battery swaps a lot harder and error prone for regular users. The battery used to be easily accessible via the back cover, which was made to be easily removable. Now you have to unglue your screen with a heat gun, get to the battery through the phone guts, remove the original battery which is likely glued in, put the new one, put the phone back together and somehow glue the screen back and hope you didn’t damage anything. Also, from my experience, 3rd party replacement batteries typically don’t last as long as the original ones do. An original battery lasted me 3 years, after which I had to keep replacing 3rd party batteries every 4 months because they kept dying.
Batteries got harder to access, making battery swaps a lot harder and error prone for regular users. The battery used to be easily accessible via the back cover, which was made to be easily removable. Now you have to unglue your screen with a heat gun, get to the battery through the phone guts, remove the original battery which is likely glued in, put the new one, put the phone back together and somehow glue the screen back and hope you didn’t damage anything. Also, from my experience, 3rd party replacement batteries typically don’t last as long as the original ones do. An original battery lasted me 3 years, after which I had to keep replacing 3rd party batteries every 4 months because they kept dying.