Mobile Phones Are Junk. Don't Buy A New One.
Why I repaired an old phone from 2016. If you're gonna use one...
Anyone who thinks the mobile phone is a breakthrough of civilization is delusional.
More than any other electronic device— and all electronic devices carry a brain penalty for use, mobile phones are one of the great self-inflicted poisons, like smoking.
You just have to walk around to see the effect smartphones have on people. It’s not health. It’s electing to have an anti-social mental disease.
Even without phones a lot of their users are bad enough. Phones make stupid people worse— they fit those beings for whom humanity is always comfortably out of reach.
An entire industry encourages all this.
If, as God Emperor, I had my way I would ban mobile phones from existing. Or only a tiny cognitive elite would be allowed to use them and the internet. Or something like that.
Unfortunately I'm not.
In the world we live in you're expected to use them, to be permanently online, instantly accessible and wired into the communication hotgrid.
Believe it or not you can operate without a mobile phone, which probably sounds like dangerous heresy to many of you, but it does come with some inconvenience.
So that's what I think about phones in general.
They offer convenience.
But wait! What about all the cool stuff you can do them ?
99% of my own use for them is exceptionally plain. Phone, text, calendar, notes and occasional access to a website.
I don't play games or download mindless apps. I don't even do email on them anymore. No social media. I won’t be using the Substack app that they try and push on you.
I mostly don’t think that much about phones when I buy them.
I might vaguely prefer the shape, price or branding of one over a different one, but they are otherwise black bricks to me. How anyone can get excited by one new one over another is an opaque mystery of bugman consumerism.
While all of that is true, within the context of evil that mobile phones are, I quite liked a particular phone.
Perhaps it was about some nostalgia— about my life at that time when I got it. And it performed very well. I never spent enough money on these things to really know, but it was comparably fast or faster than a more recent and decentish Motorola I also had new at the time. And it is still considerably faster than cheaper end Android phones today. But its real charm was it was slim and felt good in the hand.
I actually bought it in a hurry from one of those scummy mobile phone booths some years ago that only scumbag retards frequent and that one assumes act as front operations for criminal elements.
Though I get the impression more affluent morons— the Hunter Biden types might also go to them from time to time for repairs as they assume the nice people behind the counter just stupidly serve their betters and won't be able, or try to, access anything in their vast pornography collection.
But getting back to the phone. I had to look up what it was as I couldn't remember. It was old when I got it.
It's a Huawei P9 from 2016. So not a new phone. ULTRA-archaic by bugman standards, who changes his smartphone every 1.5 years.
A few years back I put it in a sports bag, and when I got home I trod on the bag not realising it was in there.
And I used it, bent, with a depressed power button that now had to be pushed really hard and a broken screen.
Bits of screen would fall out over time but it kept going.
It was still actually functional up until a month or 2 back.
Then the dark liquid of doom appeared on the display making things harder to see, and some months after that what remained of the display turned into multibanded pixel patterns. With 90% of the screen unavailable, you couldn't really do anything with it.
The first bugman instinct is, “I need a new phone, right ?”
With great apathy I looked at Huawei's successor models in that line and others. But they all just seemed to suck. They became more and more black-brick-like as time went on or had childish designs and none were the same thinness or thinner.
As you can tell, I'm not an aficionado for mobile phones, but there aren't that many thin smart phones apparently.
It's just not where the market went. Through a process of experience, customer demand and so on, the market just settled on a thicker phone.
Consumers want battery life, manufacturers want to sell you battery life, and that means thicker phones with giant batteries.
If I'm going to summon up any enthusiasm on this stupid topic I want the thinnest phone.
This phone is 7 years old and although thinner phones have appeared from time to time I read, it’s still thinner than most modern ones. That’s kind of incredible to me.
And I thought what do I need a new phone for ? Can someone explain to me ?
So I can read Instagram 15% faster ? Nope.
To play some stupid new game ? Nope.
To get 5G ? What for ? So I can download some stupid app I don’t need quicker ?
I’m not into the wild 5G conspiracy theories, but it’s fairly clear corporations and the public/private tech-complex doesn’t want any impediment on how these things advance. It periodically invests a lot in new upgraded layers of selling, surveillance and control. Questions, doubts, concerns are a problem that needs shutting down.
Ah I know, to get the latest version of Android ?
For some new essential “feature” ? Yeah right that sounds great...
And it's not that malware and viruses and other badware don't exist. They do. But this plague has historically been more of an inbuilt Windows problem where it’s a “feature not a bug”, rather than a *nix one and Android is essentially its own branch of linux.
The obsessive nature of the warnings about computer security in general amounts to one huge scam.
It's mainly to push the moron bugman into a more and more restricted kind of computing— a safe zone where they can just click and buy more stuff and not actually do anything, not that they were in danger of doing anything anyway.
Not to say smartphones aren't spying on you in all kinds of ways to extract your bugman information, they are, and I’m all for rooting phones, and have done in the past, but it’s an effort and the techniques have changed a bit since I last done it and there’s now a vastly bigger market of phones since then, and the impression I get is definitive, reliable non-brick results with rooting has got more sparse as the number of handsets has grown. But let me know if this is something you do.
So anyway, after all that, I said I'm not going to buy a new phone, I'm gonna repair this one.
And so I did.
And after ordering a new screen from China and a new battery, and watching a video or 2, I set to work.
I had done this once before with a different Huawei phone and the results were so so.
But this was way more fiddly and nasty, with many tiny and delicate, and sometimes glued down components that had to be removed and put back and insanely fiddly connectors to attach.
This is shitty work really.
Extracting the endless fragments of broken screen wasn't something I would call fun either and took a long time and had to be done carefully.
Expecting a hard battery case I was surprised to find a soft cell stuck down with glue. Removing it was hair raising as I was expecting it to start leaking.
Stripping down a broken mobile will quickly dispel any notions of the green economy.
Apple in particular, but I’m sure Samsung, Huawei and other manufactures too go to some lengths to make this a key selling point to the liberal mind. But anyone (the bugman) who’s thinks modern electronics are somehow magically environmentally friendly is not living in reality.
These things are obviously piles of poisonous junk which most people will never see (they just see the glowing screen), a lot of which will just end up in landfills even if they are not supposed to. For those who feel environmentally inclined, mobile phone production is said to be an ecological disaster and lithium mining is a mad joke.
The green economy is highly misleading. Its intention is keeping idle mindless consumerism going on a bit longer, not reversing the damage.
Now I won't say the repair was perfect either.
Another problem came up with the warped frame of the phone, which is a common phone injury.
The frame section that holds the display (which you have to glue in) didn't seem that bad. There was a very slight unevenness— which I just left and glued the screen onto it and put everything under pressure while gluing.
In hindsight that was probably a mistake. I would have got that very slight unevenness out of the frame first to get it perfectly flat.
The back case also had its own warping but which I had to additionally compensate to match the slight unevenness in the front frame. But it kind of worked out.
I also fixed the power button but I've yet to fully fix the metal that surrounds the button that got bent a few years back.
There's a small light leak on the bottom part of the screen which might be due to any uneven warping pressure the screen is under or may be just a fault on that display.
Even with a new battery, it will not charge past 72%, so I presume some calibration issue or software impediment. The last battery would also only charge to 72%. Let me know if you know this is a Huawei “feature”.
But I did not expect this repair to be perfect. It’s reasonable.
The cost in parts in total was 36.00 pounds.
The time spent was more because I didn't know what I was doing at first, 5-6 hours over 3 nights. I could probably get it down to 2 now I know what I'm doing. But it’s really not something I normally do.
So what great insightful message can you take away from this ?
Nothing. But screw "new".
Big companies just want you to buy a new product. The entire system is designed for that outcome. They can (especially Apple), go to some lengths to discourage or make repairs very difficult.
These phones are constructed by robots in China. Although you can do it, they are often not easy for humans to repair especially without the right kit. So there is some small satisfaction in doing it.
There’s a tiny bit of rebellion against the cybercorp blob and crushing consumerism, a tiny bit of autonomy, a tiny bit of fitness I would rather have in doing this myself.
Personal Training London Central to West: contact me here.
I found out since the 72% charge is a thing with this particular phone. It might be Huawei at the time pushed their own custom charger and it wouldn't charge past a certain point without it. What a scam
https://old.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/63f4rc/huawei_p9_wont_charge_fully_marshmallow/