After my recent experience with having to fully disassemble and repair my Oneplus 13 (read my last post if you haven’t already) I came to some conclusions which have and will change the way I treat my phones, now and going forward.
What I’ve learnt about this phone in particular is that the screen is very expensive, and a lot of work to replace so that’s definitely worth protecting.
The back glass and camera lens though are not. For £20 it can be replaced with a genuine one with new adhesive. That may change my attitude to worrying about scratching the camera glass, and potentially using a case.
A new battery is less than £15, and is surprisingly easy to replace once the back cover is off. Immediately upon seeing that I completely stopped worrying about having good charging habits, I now charge to 100% and don’t stress about using it whilst charging.
The USB port, and in fact the whole lower daughter board can also be replaced for less than £15 and isn’t an involved task to perform. I’ll no longer worry about trying to opt for wireless charging to preserve the port.
What I’m saying is, have a look at a teardown video of your phone and then have a look at the price of common replacement parts. If they’re not expensive, and the device is easy to repair is it really worth the mental energy and additional cost of protective products to baby your phone? Obviously with my phone the display is very expensive, but if it were a phone with an LCD panel rather than AMOLED it would probably be around £20 to replace the whole display assembly. At that price you’d be better off replacing it rather than buying a premium screen protector!
When you have the ability to repair a product, and parts are readily available a phone stops being this prized possession and can just be looked at as more of a tool, to be used and repaired when necessary. Quite a liberating thought, especially for someone like me who has always hated the thought of scratches and damage that I could do nothing about.
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