Hold the phone: Best repair jobs
‘‘Every year tens of thousands of electronic devices are discarded.’’
Paul Smith
Consumer NZ product test manager
Samsungs are easiest to fix, while Sony, Nokia and Motorola phones are a ‘‘nightmare’’, according to a smart phone repair shop owner.
Consumer NZ has introduced repairability scores for mobile phones, giving the highest score to the Samsung Galaxy A12.
Smart Phone Repairs owner Paul Gwynne said the easiest phones to repair in general were Samsungs, followed by iPhones, then Huawei phones. Sony, Nokia and Motorola phones were a ‘‘nightmare’’, he said.
A lot of cheaper phones were not worth fixing, but ‘‘if you’ve spent $2000 on a phone, then it’s definitely worth getting it done’’.
Eighty per cent of the repairs were for broken screens, and there were also a lot of clogged up charging ports.
‘‘Being in people’s pockets they get full of lint and that kind of stuff, and people out on jobs get all kinds of rubbish stuck in the charging ports. It’s not often they need to be replaced,’’ Gwynne said.
There were also a lot of battery replacements. ‘‘Water damaged phones we’re reluctant – we can fix them, but because they’ve been water damaged there could be other things go wrong in the future.’’
It was getting harder to fix phones as the technology became more sophisticated, he said. ‘‘Everything’s getting smaller inside, so they can fit more stuff in, and . . . the face ID cameras in the iPhones and that are all coded to the phones now, rather than just a spare part.
‘‘If something goes wrong with that, there’s nothing you can do. Even if you send it to Apple, they just replace it with a new one . . .’’
Phone companies were also getting stricter about accepting warranty claims, he said.
Consumer NZ’s scores were calculated using five criteria, including how easy a product is to take apart, and the availability and price of spare parts. The lowest rating went to the iPhone XR. Huawei and Oppo had not yet provided scores.
‘‘Every year tens of thousands of electronic devices are discarded in New Zealand, and a lot of those end up in landfill,’’ Consumer NZ product test manager Paul Smith said yesterday. There had been some progress in repairability.
‘‘While the Apple iPhone 12 series doesn’t have class-leading repairability, it’s a vast improvement from the iPhone 11, due to a simpler dismantling process and cheaper spare parts. In March, Apple announced it would begin supplying iPhone parts and guides to independent Kiwi repairers who have completed a free certification process. Samsung Galaxy phones released in the past six months score much better than previous models, due to Samsung now making spare parts easier to find.’’
Consumer NZ was starting with scores for a limited number of phones, as not all manufacturers gave the necessary information.
The index relied on manufacturers scoring their own products but Smith said rival companies and consumers should call out businesses that posted an inflated score.