The right to repair movement is moving full speed ahead and iFixit and Nokia are making sure of it
by working together to make the G22 a fully repairable phone, kind of.
And at least it's easier to repair. So we're gonna see if I can do some repairs.
I asked logistics to break some part of the phone to see if I can figure out what it is
and see if I can actually fix it with the parts provided from iFixit.
Let's start with the unboxing here. I do like the just plain cardboard look.
It's pretty slick. You got the iFixit logo on the back there so you know it's gonna be very repairable.
And then inside here, we have the phone.
I don't know what's wrong with it. I can't tell. Let's see what else is in the box though.
In the box we have our manual, a sim popper,
and just a USB C2C cable, three footer.
One thing I actually just noticed is the lack of plastic is pretty darn nice.
It's all just cardboard and paper and I'm sure it's even recycled paper
but I cannot confirm that. Look at the phone itself. It comes with a, well I guess this is plastic,
this little plastic cheap case that comes with a lot of the budget phones.
Nice to have, keep your phone safe. Nice.
Wow, this is actually a big phone. I don't know, I kind of just assumed, maybe I just associate Nokia with small phones
ever since they're little bricky kind of phones but this is a 6.5 inch 720p display.
It is 90 Hertz which is nice but 720p on such a big screen is a little bit disappointing
but we'll see more when we get it all turned on. Other than that, it is a plastic body
so it's got the plastic ridges. It's Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which is a bit older
but maybe keeps the cost down and then the back is just a 100% recycled plastic back.
I like the color, it's a blue and also comes in a gray.
It's pretty good though. I actually usually prefer a black phone. This is a nice, nice blue.
I like the contrast between the ridges on the sides
and the blue, like a dark water blue, it's nice.
But you can't tell, it's pretty fingerprinty.
I swear I washed my hands, I swear.
Let's take a look at the rest of the phone. On the right side of the phone here we have our power button and fingerprint scanner combo,
a volume rocker. On the top we got absolutely nothing,
no mics or anything. On the left side we have our SIM tray
and I should open that up because I believe this has an SD card slot.
Yeah, so we have our SIM card, SD card combo
which is great so you can put up to a terabyte,
two terabytes. It actually can be limited by software in the phone
which is odd. On the bottom here, I'm liking what I'm seeing.
We have a headphone jack. We've got a mic hole, we've got USB-C
and we've got speakers. So this has got everything you need.
Great, you can use one cable for your switch, your laptop, your phone.
You got your microphone for recording stuff and things. But yeah, the headphone jack is great to see it.
It's something that's missing in many high-end phones. It appears in a lot of budget phones which is odd
but we'll take these dubs. And then on the back we have our triple camera setup.
So we have a 50 megapixel main camera, a two megapixel depth camera
and a two megapixel macro camera. So you pretty much have one camera.
You don't really use the depth camera. Usually cameras will use it to get faster focus,
maybe a bit more contrast. But you know, flagships don't use a depth camera
that's not really all that necessary. And then a macro camera, I mean,
we've seen a few in the past that are pretty darn trash but we'll try it again and see if it's any good.
And then of course we have our flash here. Oh, it's not just a 50 megapixel camera.
It's a 50 megapixel AI camera. Whoa.
And then just a tasteful Nokia. Okay, I should acknowledge this now.
Is it Nokia or Nokia? I've got no, I, no Kia.
I've, hmm, we'll workshop it. What's interesting is that it is landscape.
Usually it's vertical because that's how you hold it for most of the time. But now if you're taking pictures,
seeing that will make anybody smile. Well, I can't hold it in any longer.
There does seem to be an issue with this front screen. It looks like somebody dropped it.
I thought I asked logistics to break this phone, not Linus.
So before we get everything turned on, let's see if I can fix this.
I am not handy at all. So Nokia and I fix it claim
that this is an easier to repair device. So you don't need any crazy tools.
And they should be able to do most everything with just a screwdriver and the kind of guitar pick lift
to get the back of the screen off. So on their store, they actually have a few options to buy
straight from my fix it. So they have the back glass, the screen,
a charge port and the battery. So kind of the most common things to go wrong.
And obviously we are gonna need to do the screen,
which might be the hardest or at least the most complicated to get to
because we're gonna take apart most of the phone to get there. I might need to call Van, we'll see.
So to get myself a little bit of help though, I'm gonna pull up by fix its guide on the repair
to make sure I don't mess anything up because I don't even really know
the first step of getting into the phone here. All right, step one, we gotta eject the SIM tray.
Get that out of there. Oh, that's cool. So actually have like a little,
I don't know if you will see it. There's a little notch inside of this
where you put the pick. Slide it down the phone.
We got this. Come on now. Oh, but I gotta be careful
because there's a little ribbon here. Yeah, if this doesn't work, the video's very short.
There's a big warning. It's like, do not puncture the battery.
I'll show you. So I said the fingerprint scanner and the motherboard frame at least so far
are using the same type of screws. That's one less thing to have to worry about mixing up,
but we'll see how many screws there are after getting all this out.
Now I've seen things break from ripping them off contact, so I wanna be really careful here.
Oh, that was easy. So far, this is a lot easier than I anticipated.
Now we're going to unfasten the loudspeaker, which is all these bottom screws,
which when I just read, should be the same length as every other screw so far,
which is nice.
It is, huh. So that's what the instead of a phone looks like.
Had no idea. And now we have our first different sized screw,
which is for the charging port. So we're gonna take away this little guy.
This one's only 2.8 millimeters, just a small boy,
unfastening the motherboard. And these are more of the different sized ones,
but luckily still the same size as that charging port screw.
And it's nice that the smaller screws are a different color from the rest. So it's really easy to tell.
All right, this is the main brain of the phone.
Crazy. Oh my God, how many steps are there?
You didn't look before. No. I did say though, I'm pretty nervous
because I don't fix stuff. The images are super helpful.
Really easy to see what you're supposed to do next.
All right, this is what the new screen looks like. And it looks like it does not have that camera bracket.
So we're gonna need to take it out. Now this one has a scary warning.
To be, we're loosening the battery tabs and it's making very sure you're aware
that you could cause a fire or leak dangerous chemicals.
It is definitely glued in there, which is a little disappointing.
All right, so I just gotta put the new battery and the new screen and pretty much do everything in reverse.
But one notice I don't like is that, compare the new assembly to the original part.
You may need to transfer remaining components before you install it.
One of the annoying things about having to reuse so many parts is that like this foam pad is mangled.
I hope that's not super important for that piece of the camera
that now is mangled. The power button and volume button ribbon
that they had me take off to reuse is actually already on this piece.
I feel like this bracket and foam piece should have also been on there, but it seems like maybe some sets might.
I don't know why everyone wouldn't though. I don't think it's kind of annoying. I got to the part to put in the motherboard
and it's telling me to reapply thermal paste to the squares where it says to do so.
But I don't necessarily have thermal paste. Like I work at LTT, obviously I'll just walk
and go get some, but when I'm at home or if I didn't work here,
I'd have to go out and buy it now. And it's actually not listed
in the what you need section. There's somewhere, there's an optional tape,
but there's no thermal paste or anything in there. Taking apart is a hard part.
Putting back together is easy. Damn!
From Linus-ified to brand new.
All right, it might look a lot better and like Linus hasn't gotten ahold of it,
but we got to make sure it turns on. This is IP52, which is dust and water resistant,
it's just rain resistant, so we find the rain, but after doing a repair,
I might be a little bit hesitant to think it still is. Like I said, I know there are some parts
that look a little bit different than before, but with just rain resistance, it's probably fine.
Look at that, it turns on. I did it!
You know, that wasn't too bad. I feel like the repair process was a little scary,
but if you've done any repairs whatsoever before, you're probably fine.
All right, let's check out what this has inside for specs. It's interesting to see.
Come on, man. This isn't any of you. Oh, that button definitely don't press no more.
Oh, no. No, the volume rocker.
I can only turn it up. It looks like I might've gotten the volume rocker wrong,
which is interesting, because that's actually one I didn't have to do. It can't pre-done, but the volume down
does not work anymore. I can only do volume up. But it's also interesting to see what apps come pre-installed on this.
So some of these are from Labs, but like Booking.com, ExpressVPN,
those definitely are not ones that we load on. It's not like a ton of bloatware,
but it is something to be aware of. It does have some extra goo thrown in.
All right, so for specs, we have 128 gigs of storage, which again is expandable via microSD.
And then it has four gigs of RAM, which is definitely not a lot.
It might be something that limits this phone for maybe getting later Android versions.
They do promise two years of major OS updates
and then three years of monthly security updates, which is nice to see.
But the fact that this is starting on 12, it doesn't seem like it bodes well for that,
but I'm not 100% sure. And then as for SOC, it's using the Unisoc T606,
which is definitely a low-end chip.
We're gonna talk about performance a little bit here, but it is already a couple of years old
and it was pretty low-end at the time. What this might have,
I mean, we can only turn the volume up. So we may as well try doing some crab rave
and checking out what the screen looks like. Yeah, that definitely doesn't sound good.
It's definitely only coming out of the right time, using the earpiece speaker as a left channel, even faintly.
It just doesn't really have any details on how many bass or anything like that.
And then the screen itself, it's a little rough. It does not look great.
There's some ghosting, even when the crabs are moving back and forth, or even when I was just swiping to get to the video.
It did not look good. There was a lot of ghosting, even at this 90 Hertz.
But I don't watch a ton on my phone. If you're somebody who actually really cares
about what your content looks like, or you watch a lot of videos on your phone, you're gonna be like,
you actually really cares about what your content looks like, or you watch a lot on your phone.
The screen's not that great. And if you like listening to music, the speaker's not that great.
Let's try out the cameras though. It's a God High Hopes, 50 megapixel AI camera.
That's crazy. All right, I went outside and took some photos,
and let's see how they turned out. This first photo I took in the 50 megapixel mode,
and it looks okay. It's not really loading up the full resolution
until you zoom in, which is interesting. And then it kind of just fades back out
until you zoom in again, which means that the photo kind of always looks blurry.
But the colors are pretty good. Like it pops a lot, which is surprising.
Moving over to this photo of the motorcycle,
it definitely has an HDR effect where it seems like software is trying
to kind of brighten up what it thinks should be bright and darken what it thinks should be darkened.
But again, I actually don't think it's too bad.
Again, I wouldn't want to post this anywhere.
But for a quick text, it'd be fine. Now for the one with it turned off,
I actually like the color a bit better. It's more contrasty.
So maybe you just want a full bright photo
and everything to be really even, but this would be a 12 megapixel photo.
So it's just taking those 50 megapixels and bending down. And yeah, I think it looks pretty decent actually.
Whoa, there's Dan. Dan, say hi.
Well, let's try the macro camera. We'll use our little friend here.
Let's get the lowest quality photo of this little guy. Right away, this has the same issue
as the unit hurts Luna and some of the other budget phones. It doesn't tell you what four centimeters is.
And I don't know. I do like that when you get the phone close to an object in the normal shooting mode,
it alerts you to change to the macro mode. As for photo, yeah, I mean,
it looks like every single macro camera, which is not good. It's very yellowy.
The focus is okay, but the quality of the photo
is two megapixels, which means it is bad. On the front here, we have an eight megapixel camera.
I've got high hopes. Eight is a good number.
Does it have any modes on? It does. Oh, you can change the shape of bokeh.
That's cool. Oh, interesting. So that's not beauty modes.
It's changing how intense the shape of the bokeh
is in these different shapes. I don't know why all of them are turned on,
but I want butterflies and I want it to be maximum.
I'll tell you for the photo, it actually doesn't look bad. The color is a little off.
I don't know. There's just something about, it looks pretty washed out, but the sharpness, not too bad for eight megapixels.
I don't know. Overall, I don't think I'd actually, again, want to share this photo of me,
but it's not bad if my mom said, are you alive?
Well, let's check out the video. I've got high hopes for that. Yeah, this video looks really bad.
Hey, the microphone works. How does it sound?
I know, but I'm just proving it to you that it does not sound good.
Again, the colors really, really look off in the video.
Just looks like I'm looking through a bottle
where the lenses are very dirty, but I promise you, I did not touch them with my fingers.
It just looks a little rough. One thing I've read to try out is the fingerprint scanner.
So let's try that out.
Hey, that's pretty quick. One thing I haven't mentioned, even just booting into this, is that it does have quite a bit of a chin and forehead.
This is quite a bit of a forehead considering that there's also a cutout for the notch.
So we sent the phone over to lab to get tested and the results are pretty unimpressive.
Framing it in Wii on Dolphin, where we'll get a median of 25 FPS
with a 1% low of 22 FPS. On Genshin Impact, we had a median of nine FPS.
In Call of Duty Mobile, we got 21 FPS.
And let me tell you, as somebody who's actually just playing the game, it feels rough.
Of course, one thing to note is that these are pretty challenging games to run,
but even though this is a budget phone, if you're buying a phone in 2023,
you'd hope you'd be able to play games from what, 2019?
And it can't do that very well. We also had them check out the battery life,
and that was another mixed bag. So for longevity, which is watching YouTube videos,
streaming on Wi-Fi at about 50% brightness, you will get 18 hours of battery life, which is okay.
When compared to flagships, it's not great, but again, this is a phone that's quite a bit smaller.
But when you look at it the other way, this is a budget phone with a budget SOC
and a 5,050 milliamp hour battery.
They claim it gets up to three days of battery, which is of course not using it consistently that whole time,
but to get one of the lowest results that we've actually tested so far,
when you have such a big battery and an SOC that should be just sipping power,
I do expect a bit better. For the battery stress test,
the number does look pretty impressive, 11.1 hours at max CPU and GPU,
but the stress test actually failed miserably.
I say that because it got 0.7 frames a second.
It wasn't even actually able to perform well enough for long enough to even drain the battery.
It just got throttled and struggled so much that it never got to its full potential.
Now you might be saying, I don't do a ton of gaming. I just use apps on my phone like Instagram
or whatever like that. And we tested app launching as well and the numbers were equally unimpressive.
Compared to flagships that we've tested previously,
this launches apps horrifically slowly
with Instagram cold launching at eight and a half seconds.
What is nice though is that the phone does get nice and bright at 500 nits brightness.
It's got that going for it, though our Labs did again kind of confirm what I was saying
that there is quite a bad ghosting issue and that the response times are very poor.
So what does this cost?
For a phone that's very repairable and engineered as such,
but has a big battery, but also has pretty low tier grill glass and SOC.
It's unavailable everywhere, but it does cost 200 euros,
which is like 220 US dollars. And that seems like it should be cheap for a phone.
But again, the performance just really wasn't there
and the cameras weren't that great. Labs actually had mentioned that the SOC
and that should be something in a $99 phone, not a $200 phone.
$220 doesn't sound like a lot, but when you think about the other phones you can get,
you can get a used iPhone XR or eight or SE
at around that price. You can get a lot of the A series Samsung's
from that round that price. You can get Motorola's Moto G.
There are quite a few options from brands that I don't want to offend Nokia,
but a little bit more relevant or maybe has a bit more staying power.
Because I mean, yeah, you could fix this yourself and keep it, you know, lasting you for years
and years and years, but if the OS is at a date and the SOC's running slow from the day you get it,
are you really going to want to use it for that long? The nice thing is that the parts aren't too expensive.
The screen's the most expensive part at $55, with the others being $30 and $25.
So it's not like it's going to cost you a whole lot to do these repairs, but again,
I don't know if it's really all that worth it. But what do you think? I'm totally okay being wrong.
Let me know if this is a phone that you see yourself buying and maybe even how long you think you could go using it.
I'm very curious as somebody who used a lot of phones that are notoriously hard to repair.