On Planned Cellphone Obsolescence

R.I.P. Blu Studio M HD... Was your death intended?

About a month ago, my Blu Studio M HD cellphone started misbehaving; it fired up apps at random and turned off by itself.  Eventually, it was more difficult to start it again.  Today, it barely refused to come back after I turned it on seven times.  I checked how old the phone was.  Interestingly, it was almost two years old.


The suspicion was inevitable: is this a confirmation that cellphones are somehow built to fail when the two-year lifespan is reached?

I know that most experts agree on the fact that it is not that the electronic components of the phone are designed to fail, but it is the battery that dies and causes the problems. That might be true, for the problems with my phone started when I noticed that the battery ran out of juice a lot faster than usual.

However, there is a detail: I specifically bought this kind of cellphone because of its manually-replaceable battery, which, in theory, extends the lifespan of the device. Except that today it is practically impossible to find a spare battery.

The lack of spares suggests that the industry is actually not interested on "repairability."

Buying a replacement for my dying phone in December is not an easy task: I only want a fairly cheap phone that can run my jogging apps and where I can check my email.

But most phones come with more powerful processors and more memory, all of which makes phones over-qualified for my personal use and, above all, more expensive.

Predictably, the  new models cannot use the same batteries from previous models because the former require more power and, let us not forget, most phones today come with a non-removable battery.

Say what you may, but I do believe in cellphone planned obsolescence.

Changes in 2018 (Part IV): Apps for running, updates, and forced migration

I have been jogging regularly since December, 2014.  Those days, I used an app called Run-bike-hike on a Firefox OS phone to track my routes and times.

When I switched to Android, I started using a nice app called Runkeeper. 

This app helped me to stick to my goals and track my progress, so it became my trusty companion in the road.  However, it stopped working after an unfortunate update last October and and had to look for a quick replacement while developers rectified the issues.

 

I had tried Runtastic before deciding to stay with Runkeeper, so that one was a no-go for me.  I eventually found Sports Tracker, which offers many features for free and it became the substitute. 

Sports Tracker lacks some useful features, even in the paid version, like the ability to manually edit routes if the GPS reading is not accurate.  Nevertheless, it compensates with other features, such as the ghost run.  One wins some and loses some.

The Runkeeper support contacted me to help, but the problem with the app remains to be solved.  As the app is unusable on two different phones, I guess the problem is on the app's end, not mine.  I am guessing, though.

Funny... Now that I come to think of it, my migration from Windows to Linux was a lot easier than this change of apps.

A New Tool for LibreOffice

Tony Get, my colleague, showed me an interesting tool available in Android: it's an app to turn your Android device into a remote control to work with your LibreOffice Impress presentations.  It is called Impress Remote and it is very easy to use.

Once downloaded, all you have to do is open an Impress presentation on your computer and make sure of two things:

1.  That the computer and the phone are paired (bluetooth)
2.  That the presentation can work with a remote (to enable this feature, go to the tools menu in Impress->options->libreoffice impress->general->enable remote)

That is all.  If the devices are correctly paired, you are going to see the slide on your cellphone and the notes (if any) and you can navigate the slides from the cellphone.

The app works perfectly with Mageia 5.




The app has some other options, such as the possibility to connect your cellphone to your computer using a Wifi connection.  I did not test that feature, though.