Originally published at: Nokia's G22 "fixable" smartphone comes with a teardown kit | Boing Boing
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I thought Nokias didn’t break?
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Just another way to make them loveable. You can use those tools to fix your other phones.
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Good point!
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The whole Apple (and their competitors) business model is aligned with the whole carrier business model, which is your phone is “free” with a 24 month contract, and you get bombarded with “free” phone upgrade offers during this contract.
The only wrinkle in this model is that phones aren’t getting significantly better over this 12 to 24 month time period. If people could fix the parts that stop working (screens, batteries) they could keep their phones for a 5 year cycle.
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Having the USB port not grafted onto the motherboard is nice; but I’m a trifle worried about the software side of things.
Nokia is typically only good for 3 years of security updates from release date, has a record on bootloader unlocks that can charitably be described as ‘deeply mixed’; and the Unisoc T606 is…not exactly…the sort of widespread and well-loved hardware of which robust 3rd party support is made.
A repairable housing beats one that might as well have treated anti-handling as a design requirement; but throwing in a spudger is just this side of pure greenwash unless this model significantly exceeds Nokia’s typical behavior on the software front.
(edit: from their “for enterprises” page: " For selected devices you can also benefit from a 4th security patch as a value added service." That definitely sounds like someone exhibiting a sincere commitment to device longevity…It is, sadly, less garbage than more than a few others; but in absolute terms it’s trash.)
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Cadia broke before the Nokia did!
I am jealous looking at this phone and its tools; I was thinking about replacing the battery in my Moto G5, until I watched a video taking me through the many, many fiddly steps.
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Nokias historically didn’t break; but things changed when the good Mr. Elop realized that Nokia, itself, was not so durable.
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Seems like sending the repair tools out with every phone would generate a lot of unnecessary waste. They should only send the specific tools required as part of a repair kit to deal with a specific breakage.
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Based on the specs it is a budget phone…
I’m trying to figure out why I would want to exactly fix things that are nearing EOL on a budget phone. Sure it’d be nice to replace the screen if it cracked, but again what’s the cost of that replacement part compared to the overall value of the phone.
I still use an LG G7 that’s +5 years now. The battery has less than 60% capacity in it. Now I could replace the battery, but I’d still have a 5 year old phone. New, it was toward the upper end of the market, now things like Facebook reels chew through battery power because the processor isn’t optimized for them. 5 years for a phone is a good run for the +mid pack and higher end phones at least IMO. I wouldn’t except a lower tier phone to have an enjoyable user experience after 5 years.
(I will also say that I feel like my cellular data speed has steadily declined over the last 3 years. Maybe it’s just me, but it certainly feels that my non-5G phone gets a much poorer signal than it used to.)
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I replaced the battery on an iPhone 6 a couple of weekends ago, took just under an hour (I was taking it slowly, but it was actually quite a simple job). It is about 7 years old a secondhand buy, the battery and tools cost £22.
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I broke a almost brand new Nokia 3210 I think by dropping it down a dry well (well wasn’t dry at the time).
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I’m sorry, but this sort of financial thinking is exactly the reason behind our current electronic waste crisis.
In every other age of humanity, the idea of replacing an item when only one of its parts was broken, rather than replacing the part, would have been unconscionable to all but the extremely wealthy.
I get your point about older phones not being able to handle newer versions of apps, but that is a problem that needs to be solved by responsible software engineering, not by individuals chasing Moore’s law.
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Good to see, though i consider the Fairphone series superior in every way.
I looked up the repair guide, it looks a lot harder to repair than a fairphone… Especially not a fan of the glued in battery there.
But good to see it’s possible though 
Fairphone probably wins on the software side too, where you get android software updates every few months, they only stopped supporting the fairphone 2 after 7 years of constant updates, even after Qualcomm stopped supporting it’s CPU.
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I just checked out the link, the battery removal and replacement looks slightly more difficult than the iPhone 6 (which is also glued in), the main improvement is the size of the screws (there are several different length screws, but fewer, in the iPhone).
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Guess i’m just a bit spoiled by the fairphone 
On the 3+ and 4 me and my brother own, replacing the battery can be done using a fingernail and even replacing the screen only requires undoing a whole bunch of screws (admittedly tiny ones, but they’re all identical) So this Nokia is a far more complex repair.
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In most of the age of humanity technological advancement wasn’t nearly as fast as today. A hammer could pound nails in until it was mangled enough to no longer effectively do the job. The nails didn’t change so much in 10 years to render that specific hammer obsolete. You really seem to be arguing more for a build standard with part specifications rather than replaceable parts that are phone specific. More akin to the standardized parts in a computer in a custom build (rather than the customized layout of an OEM unit). If I could replace the board (cpu, memory, modem, ect) and battery in my LG for 70% of a new phone, sure I’d explore that. However I’d like to keep the IP68 rating and that may be at odds with such designs.
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Is this any more repairable than an iPhone?
You can replace virtually any component in an iPhone (and probably most Androids, I’m sure) with spudgers, tweezers, and suction cups too. Near as I can tell, they are just shipping an iFixit tool kit with the phone.
The “unrepairability” of modern devices is grossly overstated. I’ve replaced the battery in my iPad, the HD in my MacBook, the camera in my iPhone twice and the screen once. Read the iFixit guides- it really isn’t that hard to do most repairs. Worst thing is sometimes needing a little heat to soften glue holding in a battery, but the battery is glued in on this “repairable” Nokia too.
This looks like “repairwashing” to me (like greenwashing in marketing, but for repairability? 
)
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I liked it when you could unclip the back and slot in a new battery. Happier, simpler times.
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I wonder if they still be providing software updates for it 7 years later like Fairphone do?
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