Samsung smart phone £25

Here's a cheap charlie tip I'd like to share with fellow pensioners with diminishing means

Here's my take

For most of my early use - pre-brick time - I used the legendary Nokia 3110 2G . It was solid reliable, simple to use and I still keep one alive for spare (2nd hand for tenner), Note it can last a week on standby without charge vs smart phone needs charge every day.

Well I felt left behind with the onset of these v expensive smart phone, 3G,4G and now 5G. you can pay up £1000 and what astounds me is how easily the glass screens break (cos of the curved round edges design) and repair is ca £200

I needed to get my feet wet here - so I trawled EB and was surprised to find that used cracked phones were available for ca £25 = from private sellers

stay away from commercial resellers IMHO

At first sight the technology is bewildering and it took me 6 months before I was comfortable with it

So cut to the chase, I bought a used but working Samsung S8 with cracked screen. The owner assured me the cracked screen doesnt interfere with operation - and he was right.

I did some digging and saw why these screens are so difficult to repair - and even replace the battery is hard.

Well after trying many solutions - you can buy a gorilla glass screen to fit over the exisitng cracked screen but this makes the touch screen use much much more difficult - dont go there, and this screen broke in a couple of months

You can use these cracked versions for a while, but shards of glass will start to fall off and any kind of moisture getting under to the amoled surface is like dry rot and days are numbered.

SOOOOO

my solution is this

Clean and degrease the glass - assuming its still 100% in tact. The get some clear 50mm packing tape (like wide selotape) useful stuff. Carefully spread lengths over the surface make sure not to trap any airbubbles or creases - you might need a couple of goes to get the skill. Wrap around the edges and trim with a sharp blade to suit, and bobs your pawnbroker

Its worked fine for me for 6 months now and you dont notice the tape when the screen is on and touch screen is unaffected

BTW I do recommend getting one of those wireless chargers, its a pain having to plug in all the time every day

So for £25 (was £400 new). Private sellers (yuppies) will just upgrade with their phone contract and sell off their old one rather than live with a cracked screen

But be selective, choose you seller carefully, lot of sharks out there

Hope this helps other pensioners

I got a couple of brill items for buttons on ebay, just a case of waiting for a yuppie to get rid of it

• DIY screen replacement is possible
• Buy a clip on plastic case to protect the phone, one that wraps round the edges of the screen to protect it.
• Only problem with old phone is that you may not get updates which can stop some apps working and compromises security.