Gadgetory

so we are here at the headquarters of iFixit I'm here with Kyle he's the CEO of iFixit we're talking about cell phones repair ability and durability so Kyle have a question for you all right we're pretty into the repairing of cell phones what for you is the ideal cell phone so we have different materials they can be made out of plastic glass or metal which one do you prefer well I like quality materials so if you look at I mean the higher-end flagship phones they're investing more in the materials ah the iPhone is a very durable phone in general so I think that there's a lot to be said for what Apple's done I've got I have an iPhone so and it's in general like the metal that they have done right it has a pretty good build quality I have here this is a 50 dollar Android phone that they sell in India and I mean this is reasonable it's more close to like an old-school Nokia phone yeah um but I definitely like you know robust durable materials I don't really have any problem with the metal I think you could also build a plastic phone that that stood the test of time but it would probably need to be a higher quality plastic than you see here it may be a little bit thicker okay so in your ideal smartphone would it be metal or plastic you have to pick just have to pick yeah yeah I could go either way I mean I would want I just want a rugged case so if it's metal that's taking the impact if it's plastic I can go either way but I think that you know in your been tests you've shown that maybe if you go with like like the plastic phone you've got over there that's the extreme side of flimsy plastic yeah but I think you can do some things with polycarbonate so I would say I'm more about the functionality and I don't really care how you get there okay and so as far as like what about internals go so if with your when you go to buy a smartphone you have the iPhone right now what is the most important aspect for you as far as repairability you know battery life what do you look for yes so the crazy thing about most phones these days is it's gotten really commoditized right like there isn't as big a difference between all the phones on the market as there was three four years ago so everything has a camera the flagship phones all have pretty good cameras so we can sit here and we can really nitpick the difference between an s7 camera the knife on excess camera isn't huge right they're both really good cameras within the form factor well I would say is make something bigger like actually don't need a bigger screen I think this screen could even be made a bit smaller but like give me more room for that for the camera or like the biggest design flaw with the iPhone I have my own bump that I added but the design flaw is the camera bump right so they could have made they could have given me 25 percent better battery life if they just made the entire phone that's thick as the camera yeah ah so they're sitting here and like it's funny when you when you see interviews with with Johnny you know Apple's famous designer and he say yeah what do you think about the bump and he's like well we had to do that well you didn't have to do that you can make the phone thicker mm-hmm so that would be my like make the phone a bit thicker give us a bit longer battery the phone battery what is going to degrade like after you've had it for a year or two you're going that you know be get dramatically less life out of the same battery so we should design the phone to have maybe a hundred and fifty percent more battery than you need so that a year from now when the capacity is shrunk it's still functional yeah and there's so it'll last more charge cycles because there's more right life in there exactly and we see that with the iPads like an iPad has a battery that nobody really burns through an iPad battery in the day right yeah it takes a couple days to work through it and so it's not until you've had an iPad for three or four years that you really need to change the battery well phone you need to swap the battery every year so if we're in this constraint where we're saying well we have the phones that we have now I would like to see a battery the easy to swap so my ideal phone like my favorite phone out there on the market right now is the fairphone and unfortunately and I can't use one myself because it's it's only works on the European frequencies right now so I'm hoping that the fairphone 3 comes to the US but it's designed you don't need any tools to swap the battery you don't even need any tools to swap the screen it's just plastic - absolutely and it comes out really perfect that's because that phone is pretty modular right it's designed to be extremely modular for repair ability not modular for functionality okay so you can't swap out a better camera on it but it is easy if the camera fails to swap it out to just put in the same component again that's good so just to summarize the ideal phone for the eye fix of CEO would be a phone that has a rigid case on it so like it won't bend or damage easily and a bigger battery than what is currently in most black ships and the battery that you can swap yourself and then the other things I would say is it should have a repair manual that's publicly available and there should be parts available and what's crazy is that the fairphone is the only phone in the world that has a repair manual and parts available from the manufacturer none of the other companies do it even the Indian smartphone companies even Samsung Apple HTC while way none of them are making repair information available it's crazy so you and I have to figure it out yeah instead of everybody else I don't understand I think it's the most consumer hostel market you go and you look at power tools like you came from construction right yeah every single Power Tool Company has repair information available in parts you get a Makita you get a Dewalt and you need a new clutch for your drill and they will sell it to you because if they don't the words going to get out in the construction community right if the Walt's top-selling repair parts no one would buy the Walt's anymore exactly so how do they get away with this in the smartphone world I don't understand I don't know but it's good for us as the two largest cell phone repair channels on YouTube they're gonna keep making these fragile things near the glass right you got Samsung has glass on the front in the back yeah so as long as everybody's out there making very fragile devices that are thin we're gonna keep teaching you how to swap batteries how to fix the glass how to fix the lenses on the cameras yeah it's a it's a it's a target rich environment for people that are looking to teach people how to fix their broken stuff well good well now we know what the ideal smartphone is for the CEO of iFixit I agree 100% even mkbhd mentioned something about having a thicker battery in his phones so I think you know from a consumer standpoint having a bigger battery is just better all-around it's time to end this design anorexia making things stutter and thinner and thinner to the point we cave and play pokeball on your phone exactly you can't play Pokemon go on your phone there's no point even having there's no point in living really this is what we come to what level are you at um I actually I haven't downloaded haven't you got to get going I'm working on that after this I'll do it well thanks for having me here at the studio of iFixit I really enjoy this time if you haven't subscribed to their channel yet I fix it they have fantastic repaired guys even pitchers in a blog format it is fantastic our goal is to teach people how to fix everything that they have there we go thanks for watching