No User Serviceable Parts

[billroper]

My Nexus 5 phone is three years old. It recently got the Android Marshmallow update, so from a software point of view, it's got a lot of life left in it, even if it never gets another major Android update -- which, if I understand correctly, it won't.

The battery, on the other hand, has been rapidly losing its ability to hold a reasonable charge. And having to recharge the battery during the day is possible, but annoying. And way less than optimal when playing Ingress. :)

Being a modern cellphone, the battery is, of course, not user-replaceable. This has not stopped a large number of people from doing so and posting about how to do it on the Internet. So about a month ago, I ordered a new battery. Today, I decided that things had finally slowed down long enough to try installing it.

It only took about half an hour, happily. And when I finished putting everything back together, the phone started up. (I would say "fired up", but I'm a little squeamish about using that phrase after yesterday's DVD player adventure and the numerous slagged carcasses of Samsung phones that I've seen on the news. :) )

So we'll see how the new battery does. But so far, so good.

Oh, yeah, the DVD player. Well, that fell into the category of things not worth trying to fix, so it is in the electronics recycling box. I ran over to Sam's Club yesterday evening, picked up a $50 Samsung Blu-ray player, and have installed it in place of the late player. Happily, it works too. And the picture on the new set is very nice.

I'm sure it would be even nicer with an Ultra 4K player, but those were 4.5 times the price of the Blu-ray player, so we'll not be getting one of those for a while. And it's not like I have any Ultra 4K media...

Comments

About that superduper high risk activity...

[crenelle.livejournal.com]

Well done!

[demoneyes.livejournal.com]

I looked into 4k briefly a short while back when I realised 4k TVs had become "affordable". However I soon realised that:

a) Good 4k TVs with effective High Contrast resolution still cost rather more than affordable (like 4x the cheap ones)
b) Players are expensive too
c) To appreciate the resolution we'd have to sit twice as close to the screen - 4-5 feet!
d) There aren't that many 4k discs
e) And some of those are of movies that weren't shot in 4k digital in the first place. So paying through the nose for an upscaled movie...

"Not yet" I concluded, much as you did. :-)

[billroper]

Well, the new TV is 4K, because it's also an OLED set from LG. But they had cut the price to only a few hundred dollars more than a comparable high-end Samsung and had 36 month no interest financing. That was enough to get me to buy the more expensive set.

The player can wait. OLED was what I wanted since plasma is gone.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I also have a Nexus 5. I've had it apart 5 or 6 times at least due to problems with one of the connectors. Replacing the battery is very easy on that one.

If I were buying a new TV right now I'd PROBABLY go 4K. My dream set is an OLED 4K - they're breathtaking. The Magnolia Center at Best Buy has them. It's worth it to go look at one just to see what the fuss is about.

I probably woulnd't have any 4K source material to feed it for a while, but we keep sets a long time here and I'm sure a TV bought today would some day be called upon to display 4K source.

[billroper]

I actually bought the OLED 4K set when they knocked an extra $200 off it for Black Friday. That brought it close enough to the price of the high-end Samsung quantum dot sets that I decided that it was worth paying for the better technology.

It took a couple of tries to get the screen settings right (some of them, Gretchen looked at and said, "That looks like a soap opera"), but once I did, the picture's been great.