The Cell Phone / Mobile Phone Thread

I bought a new battery for my S4 a few months back because the original one was a bit less than competent, and I've since swapped between them just to get a fresh charge immediately a couple of times. But still 99.99 percent of the times I pull the battery out, it's because the phone's so freaked out it won't even respond to "hold down the power button for over five seconds to immediately shut down".

And to be fair I think they're going for water resistance according to the bumf. So the whole thing is a sealed unit and the backplane has a little gasket that goes around the SIM and SD slots.

• Acer
• Alcatel
• Apple
• Asus
• Gionee
• Lenovo
• LG
• Huawei
• Meizu
• Oppo
• Samsung
• Sony
• Xiaomi

Then there are the local brands (which usually have Chinese OE Ms, sometimes Indian):

• Cherry Mobile
• Cloudfone
• Firefly Mobile
• Kata
• My Phone
• SKK Mobile
• Starmobile

The Blackberry Passport is most common where I am, but some Windows phones are also rather common due to what you can get on Windows you can't with Android.

Android has some use and it's very typically the HTC One M9 and M8, generally larger phones like that.

There are some smaller phones out there, but those simply tend to be for those who need mobile calls and maybe texts, but not much else - cheap and chearful.

Is Nokia still a thing? Last I heard, Microsoft had bought them out, but that didn't do as much to raise sales of Windows Phones as they hoped.

Nokia's phone division got sold off to Microsoft, and Nokia apparently wants to remake a phone division.

Save for the telco own-brand stuff, the same manufacturers are frequently seen here in Malaysia.

I've seen some ads for a local manufacturer called Ninetology, but I haven't encountered anyone actually using those.

Obviously Apples, with Samsungs a close second. Afterwards is HTC, with a load of Nokia/Microsoft Windows Phones.

Here in Indonesia, most low-end phones are either local brands, Android One devices (which technically count as local brand phones, going by manufacturer), and quite a few assorted brands like Asus, Lenovo, Windows Phone, Nokia, and Blackberry (yup, it's still a thing here). Move up the rung and you'll find mostly Sony and mid-end Samsung phones. Get to the flagship tier and it's all iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, with a few LG rarities thrown in. There are also a few brands that can be considered rare here, such as HTC and Motorola.

Speaking of Motorola, I finally decided to get a custom Moto X Style (via having a friend import it for me) to replace my 2-year-old Nexus 5. While I can certainly expect to get Marshmallow on it, I fear its updates will only progress up to Marshmallow's 6.x future releases and not Android N.

After Apple and Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, and Sony are the big names.

Here it's mostly broken and/or smashed screen-bedecked Apple Iphones, Samsung Galaxys, usually intact Moto Gs, a smattering of other brands of phone and a few either Nokia or Microsoft branded Lumias. It's pretty rare to see an Apple or Samsung phone that doesn't have a smashed screen - their build quality when it comes to impact resistance is pretty poor and a lot of folks either can't afford to get them repaired or don't see the point of getting gouged by the official repairers or by the independent chains that do the same job for marginally less money.

I updated my phone, sideloaded Samsung Pay and its framework, and now I can finally verify my card with a Verizon S6. yey

Stupid question:

I've got a phone here with a screen which is scratched on the surface, but the touch screen itself is fine.

How hard would that be to fix?

No idea. What kind of phone is it? I know, that's pretty blunt, but fixing mobile phones isn't one size fits all - since they all have pretty different ways of taking them to bits and some are built actively against the concept of user repair.

Motorola G 2nd gen

It has Corning Gorilla Glass 3, so in other words it worked as protection (as besides the scratch you can see, nothing changed). The touchscreen is undamaged, the external layer of protection isn't. But if you want to not see that scratch, you replace both. Which wouldn't exactly be cost-effective (as the touchscreen still works).

edited 4th Nov '15 3:44:18 AM by entropy13

Eh, fair enough - thank you.

I'll just leave it, then.

edited 4th Nov '15 4:31:05 AM by RatherRandomRachel

I found a rare as heck Nokia today in a second hand shop. It's the Nokia Asha 503, running their Nokia Asha software platform 1.2 - aka whatever they scraped up off the floor when they killed their Meego platform. It was reasonably priced for a smart phone but there's almost no apps and the customers who had it and left reviews online didn't like it much at all.

eta phone specs page:

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_asha_503-5794.php

edited 4th Nov '15 5:47:53 AM by TamH70

So my contract is up early next week. My plan is to do more or less what I bought this phone with the intention of doing: take it to a pay on the go contract-free plan. (I'd love to go to Google Fi, but I don't have $300 lying around for the new phone I'd be required to get, and my nonexistent credit means they won't give me an installment plan.)

I've decided that Straight Talk is the best deal available for a Verizon phone. A couple of weeks ago I went to Walmart and asked their mobile sales team members if the Straight Talk bring your own phone kit includes a way to do a SIM unlock. The one who knew what I was talking about said I'd have to go through the carrier for that.

So tonight I went out to the closest Verizon store to my place of work I could find, which was the opposite direction of my way home. The salesman I spoke to had no knowledge of any kind of carrier lock on the SIM card, but told me if I had any problems with my switch, that particular store was only a franchise and I should go to the corporate store even further away from home.

I went all the way out there, and the salesperson did know what I was talking about, but told me "Verizon doesn't unlock phones. They did tell us that recent model iPhones are already carrier unlocked." Well, bully for iPhone users, but this is a Samsung.

So I guess I'm going to have to go to a third party, or summon up the courage to do it myself. I didn't want to do either of those because nobody would have more ability to do it without breaking it than the carrier that locked it in the first place.

EDIT: okay, from Verizon's own website, they don't lock their 4G postpaid phones. So I'm going to just get my Straight Talk SIM and see if it works out of the box.

edited 28th Nov '15 6:02:00 PM by TParadox

I don't understand why Americans put up with the amount of fuss and bother (keeping it clean, indulge me) that the mobile phone networks put them through. To be fair, they used to do the same kind of idiocy over here, but were quickly persuaded otherwise due to market forces.

Anyone who really WANTS an unlocked mobile phone can get one, and use them on whatever network they want to use them on, as long as it operates in the UK. Even if they've already bought the phone from another network, all it costs is around thirty pounds to a high street mobile phone unlocker company/shop and it's theirs to do with as they wish.

And we have nowhere near the kind of consumer protection advocates that exist in the States.

Not many years ago, it was illegal to unlock your phone. Some BS about how the firmware the way it had been written was copyrighted and modifications to it are reverse engineering piracy vandalism.

Update: I seem to be on Straight Talk service now. My phone says it's on Verizon and that Verizon is the only network available, but ST has activated my device and given me a number (I was going to port it to save the step of cancelling my old service, but the process froze and this is cheaper anyway).

However, I do not have any data access. I'm not sure if this is a problem on my end or the network's.

I was really freaking out about the network name until I got the text welcoming me to ST. Now I figure I have voice and texting, the wifi works when I can get on a network, I can make this work while I troubleshoot.

edited 1st Dec '15 3:33:34 PM by TParadox

Got a call from Straight Talk this morning checking in to make sure I'm happy with my service! They came to me so I could tell them my internet didn't work.

But I was busy when they called, so I asked them to call back at 7:30.

It is now after midnight.

I might be getting a wakeup call tomorrow morning.

edited 3rd Dec '15 10:16:53 PM by TParadox

Managed to at least temporarily fix the long standing problems I have been having with the camera and volume control buttons on my keepsie and fairly battered Nokia Lumia 520. It's a fairly common problem - the soldering that keeps the button micro switches connected to the motherboard in the phone isn't all that brilliant at staying integrated and tends to shear away just enough to cause the buttons not to work.

For a permanent fix, I reckon that the solder needs to be re-heated to allow it to form a proper seal again, but you can do a fairly long-term fix with some thin slivers of plastic from a one litre milk bottle inserted beneath the switches that braces them against the motherboard and forces a connection between them. I did a similar fix for my power button well over a year ago and it is still working. And I owe my working phone to a post thread on iFixit which at first I thought was too simple a solution.

I feel a tiny bit proud about this.

Seems I spoke too soon. The fixes worked, but trying to repair another Lumia 520 set up a chain of circumstances that led me to have to get hold of this bad boy today:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/mobile/phone/lumia640/

Screen's mahoosive compared to my 520 of Blessed Memory but whether I'll get used to it as quick as I did that one remains to be seen.