A colleague and I both have a #Fairphone, they have a 3, I have a 3+. For a few days, theirs have had trouble charging. The bottom module was the obvious culprit, and they could just have bought a replacement one, but their phone has been through a lot of falls, and also a big water event.

So there was the question of "What if it is not the bottom module, but the whole phone just dying?", and they were wondering if it was worth buying the piece only to find out it wasn't that. I can understand, I had that with a former thinkpad of mine, bought the obvious piece to repair it, which did not work, and it completely died a bit later...

So I just went "Hey, how about I take the bottom module out of mine and we try it on yours. If everything is fine, then it's very probably the bottom module that need to be replaced, if it still does not work, then you know you probably need to look for a new phone". So we did, and yep it confirmed that the bottom module is failing as everything was fine with my module.

But this is something we couldn't have done with basically any other smartphone. They are not into tech, but even them had open and unscrewed their phone once, just to see, and they were comfortable with me opening everything and switching pieces, precisely because Fairphone makes its phones that way. They will buy a new module, and change it themselves, or maybe ask me to do it.

As simple users, it gave us at least some power to work on it, try things, repair it, make it longer by replacing just a piece, rather than the whole phone.

This is how it should be.

#RightToRepair #Sustainability #PowerToTheUser