Nothing also hasn’t revealed if removing the rear panel will provide easier access to the CMF Phone 1’s internals, including its battery, but the feature may focus more on customizing appearance and functionality than improving repairability.
Hopefully it’s still repairable in that case. Although I’d love to see it prioritized more.
I think they are betting big on reparability with this phone.
Edit: Marquez just put out his video and it DOES NOT have an easily swappable battery. Huge missed opportunity. But it’s a $200 phone so at least for longevity… well, the phone hardware will probably age more poorly than the battery, so nobody is likely to keep this thing for long enough that battery degradation is a significant concern. It would have been nice to have the convenience of having an easy swap or extended battery though. What appeared to be an extended battery in images was a wallet.
I love that this appears to have the option of installing an extended battery. I had one on my HTC Incredible, and got one for my wife too when she got her HTC Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt had CRAP battery life because of the drain from the new
3g4g radio, and the Inc was so small… I probably wasn’t helping the battery situation with my custom ROMs. But we didn’t mind a bit of extra bulk in order to achieve a full day+ of heavy use, and had a spare battery we could bring with us if needed, too.And then the sleek, gorgeous HTC One m7 came out and after only one generation, sealed in batteries were the norm for every other phone I’ve ever owned. Now, the battery life wasn’t so bad - and so I didn’t mind, but all these years later I wish it were at least an option on the market.
Fun fact. The Thunderbolt had two modem chips, a 3G modem and a 4G modem. Normally phones have one modem. Also the 4G modem was indeed super inefficient and ate electricity for breakfast. It was necessary at the time as Verizon hadn’t fully integrated CDMA and LTE yet.
Oh that’s right - it was right on the cusp of 4g. Thanks for that.
Wow, that’s a pretty hamfisted approach, but they did the best with what they had I guess.
I seem to remember motorola having a phone awhile back (2016?) that had basically a magsafe battery pack that would just lay on the back of it. And a speaker and such. It was gimmicky given how uncomfortable the naked phone would be to hold in your hand, but it was cool that such a thing was possible.
Yeah, I had that one too actually - the Moto Z. I rather liked the feel of it with nothing on the back at all, but there were swappable magnetic plates you could put on it if you didn’t like the feel. I never bought into the Moto mod ecosystem but was definitely into the idea of the battery pack and IIRC, there was a full camera body with a zoom lense you could buy too.
Interesting phone if they price it right.
Modular phones are a solution looking for a problem. Every use case is either “I wanna upgrade my CPU” or something that can be achieved with a case.
Lame. Add a removable battery and its IP68, I’m sold.
is it customizable with no security issues?
