Nokia (Photo Hermann Traub / Pixabay)
Did the smartphone break? Not bad! HMD Global, the Sino-Finnish joint venture set up to resurrect Nokia as a phone brand, this weekend introduced the G22 – a new smartphone not intended for those looking for the best, but for those whose devices tend, for one reason or another, to break time and time again .
At first glance, the G22 doesn’t look very different from other smartphones aimed at the lower market segment, with a boring build and a selfie camera placed in a waterdrop-shaped notch in the middle of the top of the screen. But the company promises that this is one of the easiest devices to repair ever; In fact, to prove it, Adam Ferguson, product manager at HMD Global, performed a battery change in front of journalists at the announcement event. It took him about 5 minutes, and he added that a screen replacement would take about 20 minutes. By comparison, he claimed that changing a battery in most other devices today takes 90 minutes.
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To encourage users to repair the device at home, the company has signed a collaboration with the iFixit network of repair laboratories, which will provide spare parts and appropriate work kits, with the device manufacturer promising to provide both things for 5 years. The prices of the spare parts will start from 19 pounds (about 85 shekels) for a charging socket – one of the parts that break down often, and up to 45 pounds (about 200 shekels) for the screen. The device itself will be sold in Europe starting March 8 at a price of 150 pounds (about NIS 660).
It is interesting to note that the company was asked at the event why do you even need tools to change a device’s battery, unlike the Nokia devices (Motorola, Ericsson, and all the other past brands of the 90s and 2000s) of the past, whose back panel could simply be opened by hand, pulled out the battery and insert a new one. Ferguson replied that a removable battery and a manually opened panel would have forced the company to settle for a smaller battery, with a slower charging rate, and on the other hand would have caused an increase in the thickness of the device.
Also when it comes to updates, Nokia was a bad surprise: the device comes with Android 12, which is more than a year old, and will receive only two updates – that is, one to align with the devices launched in recent months and one in a year. In the following years it will receive only security updates. This is in contrast to Fairphone, a European manufacturer of devices where some repairs do not require special tools at all, which is currently in final tests for the Android 13 update for the first generation of its smartphone, which was launched 7 years ago (!).
Apart from the relative ease of repair, this device does not offer much: a 6.52-inch screen with a refresh rate of 90 Hz at a resolution of only 720p (an outdated resolution that almost no manufacturer has used since 2018 or so), a rear camera setup where, apart from the main sensor, at a resolution of 50 megapixels, the other two (depth and macro), settle for a poor resolution of 2 megapixels (yes, a figure we haven’t seen since 2013), Unisoc T606 processor (a chip from 2021 that is manufactured with 2017 technology), 4 gigabytes of working memory and 64 GB storage. However, it does include biometric security in the form of a fingerprint scanner on the side of the device and resistance to dust and water in the IP52 standard.
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