Cell Phones: Repair or Replace?
iPhone 4’s Retina Display v.s. iPhone 3G (Photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano)
Americans throw away over 125 million cell phones per year. Even more strange, we have over 500 million retired cell phones sitting around our homes awaiting disposal. This not only is an expensive and wasteful habit, it represents an avalanche of e-waste which will hit our landfills sometime soon when we collectively realize its time for spring cleaning. Cell phones are complex assemblies containing the toxic metals lead, cadmium and berillyum plus a fire retardant.
So the question becomes, when these little buggers go on the fritz, what do we do? Search out the nearest trashcan? Or try and save ourselves the hassle of trying to lie our way into warranty protection, or the expense of just buying a new phone.
A friend of mine has repaired his phone several times…he even rode is bike over the thing, but somehow brought it back to life. .
If your cellular phone suffers some mishap you may be able to fix it yourself or take it to a repair shop and see if they can help. If it is just the screen that has been damaged you can try searching online for a replacement screen. Scratches can often be removed or reduced by using a scratch remover product, gently rubbing the screen in a circular motion until the scratches fade.
If it has been damaged beyond recall you’ll just have to bite the bullet and get a new one. Often the cost of repairing a cell phone is not viable and it will be cheaper to replace it. If it is an old model you may be ready for an upgrade anyway, in which case this is a good excuse to treat yourself. This then raises the question of what to do with the old phone – should you sell your iphone? Or not.
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Category: Saving Money
