my headphone Jack recently broke and I wanted to replace it because I use my headphones very frequently. According to the replacement shop the only thing I could do would be buying a new motherboard at ~120€. I checked upon ebay and found out, that many manufacturers that don’t advertise themselves as “sustainable” had easy parts to “clip” in a new module with the headphone jack (and one or two other cheap parts). Most of those modules come at 6-15€ which I find very reasonable. However I bought an other headphone jack for another phone which looked fitting for my purpose and soldered the damn thing as a replacement. It works fine and without any flaws but I would consider myself pretty skilled with soldering. I don’t think the average customer could do so and this is why I find it inacceptable that a part that can break pretty easy requires the customer to replace it for 120€, while other manufacturers have no problem putting it in a cheap module. The other thing is, that with a motherboard replacement, I’d have to backup the whole thing and reinstall everything.
For a product that advertises itself as sustainable I would have expected this to be a lot easier.
I agree it’s a pain. As for the USB connector. As this is quite a specific thing which could b better, please consider to add this to the whishlist. (Even though general repairability was already on the list, I added the cell buffer battery, because it’s quite specific and a part of the phone which is bound to fail at some point.)
I changed the category of this topic from Repair to Roadmap because the topic does not discuss a process of repairing the phone, but the design of the phone.
it fits as for the size more or less (had to sand off the little plastic pins on the side) and the contacts are pretty much at the right spot, although they are bent to the wrong side of the jack. As for fixing it in position I used 4 tiny points of hot glue - be very careful with that because you dont want to get any of this on the connectors for cables.
My headphone jack was broken and i wanted to repair it instead of buying a new motherboard and the solution seemed to work out for me. Don’t get me wrong, I can repair shit but a friend of mine could be called as very “skilled” with stuff like this… He said, it was incredibly hard to change.
Cut it short, it did not work out that well or even at all. The Jack has been replaced but only one speaker of the headphones is working when plugged in fully. The regular speakers are not working at all any more and the microphone is down too. So at the end I will have to change the motherboard again I reckon (if anyone knows an other solution for me: please tell me).
So, if you are not some kind of micro-electronics-engeneer, I would not recommend trying to change the FP1U’s headphone jack (by a Sony part) .
I just hope that FP2 handles much better with that stuff coz EUR 120 for fixing a minor problem does not match the idea behind fairphone for me.