Sibylla Bostoniensis

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

They'd ordered (what they thought was) the right battery, but in some sense what they got was the wrong one. I don't know if they were shipped the other battery, some third battery, or the battery they ordered only it turned out to be wrong because is some third option OnePlus 9s can wind up taking that iFixit or their source didn't know about.

I wasn't there, but Mr B informs me that though the boss (owner?) was extremely professional about it all, he could tell that he just loathes the OnePlus. Me too, buddy, me too.

So now the hopefully-correct battery is on order, but will not be getting there until next Wednesday.

Mr B was somewhat apologetic about all of this, and brought up the possibility – mostly to discount it – that going somewhere else to have it fixed might get us better results. But as far as I am concerned this is going swimmingly. I knew that this was probably going to be an utter fiasco from the point I got to step 12 of the iFixit guide, backed out, and resolved to pay someone else to go through it for me. I give someone money, they do the thirty steps to get the battery out and look at it, wrangle with vendors to get the right battery, do the thirty steps to put it back in, once a battery arrives, do the thiry steps to take it back out and replace the battery with the new one, lather, rinse, repeat as many times as is necessary. This is, as far as I'm concerned, fucking fantastic. I'm imagining myself sitting at the desk trying to remove ten screws with another 18 steps to go while my spine attempts to shear through a nerve root.

Now the pregnant battery has had a thorough prenatal exam, the boss was able to say it was safe to use in the meanwhile; the junior guy hadn't gotten as far as examining it and was alarmed that it might be damaged and about to go into labor at any moment, but that seems not to be so.

So I'm back to using my phone, carefully, holding it as a kind of phone-sandwich – phone, back, case – because the back is being held on, insofar as it is, with residual stickiness of the old adhesive, and the case clinging to the volume and off buttons.

This phone is what I do, like, 60%+ of my computing on, because keyboards are still challenging for me in a variety of physical ways, so this is important.

I've had this phone since mid-Jan, 2022, a replacement for the identical model I got in the summer of 2021 which bricked itself four months later, and mostly hated it. My loathing mostly subsides to a vague disappointment between episodes wherein I have to do anything to it or ask much of it.

Given the difficulties we've had with my OnePlus 9s, and how infuriating I've found them, we're thinking it's time for both of us to get off the platform. Mr B also got a OnePlus 9 shortly after I did; his didn't die, but it goes wonky if he doesn't reboot it every three days or so. While his battery seems fine as of yet, his phone is even older than mine (because mine is a replacement for the older one that bricked itself); and we now know we have no idea what battery his takes, and it would be major surgery on it to find out.

So I guess I'm back in the cellphone market, which fills me with trepidation, dread, and angst. Sure, I might find something vastly superior to the OnePlus 9. Or maybe I will jump from the frying pan into some other vendor's fire.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I want.

When I was finally forced off my G3 Motorola RAZR V3xx by the decommissioning of the G3 network, I knew what I wanted, ish: small, lightweight, fits in my jeans pocket, sturdy, supports other devices tethering to its internet, and durable because it is going to go on adventures with me and I am not gentle on my tools.

But that was because I was a bit of road warrior: it was my connection to the internet when I was at any of the five or so offices I was seeing clients at, or on the bus or train there or back. I wanted something easy to carry in my bag or on my person, and it wanted it to be as lightweight as possible to hold, because of my wrists.

Now, I am mostly bed-bound, and it's the predominant device I use to internet from bed. Lightweight is nice, but not as much a priority because I have a phone holder to suport its weight. Where before I wanted a small device and was willing to trade off screen real estate, now having more screen is better.

(I do wonder if I should be getting some form of tablet for bed-use, and a smaller, more portable phone, for the road, on which I am rarely.)

Mr B has been yearning after a Motorola Razr flip phone, so maybe will be doing that. I confess it does look very cool, and the Motorola Razr brand earned tremedous credit with me. But I don't know that a flip phone is compatible with my cellphone holder grippy thing, that puts pressure on the phone top and bottom to hold it. It's also almost twice the weight of my OnePlus phone, which is already pretty heavy.

We're on T-Mobile, and T-Mobile has their own phone product line, the Revvl, which is actually manufactured (rumor has it) by TCL. It's super cheap, and they just announced that the latest model comes with a really... interesting... feature. It comes with Starlink capability. That both fascinates me and makes me queasy. I can think of any a number of emergency situations in which having Starlink available would be super, but why couldn't it be owned by somebody who doesn't suck and who needs the money and is not likely to turn it off just to spite geographic areas he's feeling retaliatory against?

Lurching all the way in the other direction, I've discovered Murena, which is the answer to both the questions "How can someone in the US get a Fairphone?" and "Has anybody made a commercial de-Googled Android yet?" Their OS is /e/OS, and it comes with a lifetime free subscription to the Murena cloud, which is based in Europe (Finland, IIRC); they sell a whole bunch of interesting phones including the Fairphone Gen 6, including a Teracube, a CMF, and, wackily enough, some Pixels. Going with an /e/OS phone seems like a reeeeeeeeeally interesting lifestyle choice, given the issues with app compatibility. I wonder how miserable it would be to live with, especially given my appaholicism. (If you have done this, let me know how you find it.)

And then there's Ulefone, the Android phone for anybody who cares about a small form factor, finds it tedious to have to remember to charge a phone every week, is concerned with accidentally maybe running over their phone with a tank, and/or thinks they might want spontaneously to do underwater infrared night-time photography in -20ºC conditions some day. I confess they do kind of have my number here. I do wish I could physically handle one to see what it's like to grip and try to use. Unfortunately, the way you get a phone with a two week battery life and a case that is potentially (literally) bulletproof is by making it more than three times as heavy as a standard phone.

And then there's the question of whether I want to jump ship on Android all together and go with an iPhone. I know people who develop for both Android and iOS, and listening to them, I get the impression that, under the hood, the iPhone is much better, more robust software, and a much nicer experience to develop against.

I have no idea what I'm going to do at this point, but those are some options I'm considering.