News Samsung, Apple fined over treatment of older-generation smartphone customers

Maybe the £5million in fines should be forwarded to customers who want their phone repaired for free and to have the software rolled back. £5m is nothing.

 

So phone manufacturers now have a legal precedent they can quote as an excuse for not providing updates, good job Italy.

 

No they don't. They have been caught with their pants down. I would imagine even wider lawsuits would happen if the systems were left unsecure.

 

Like they needed an excuse.

However not providing at least security updates would fall foul of big G's new android terms.

 

Nope. This lawsuit was about trying to stop them from releasing updates that make the devices worse, nothing in it that compels them to release updates that improve the devices though.

 

They don't improve them now. They just insist on people upgrading phones. It just stops them screwing up phones that people don't want to upgrade. The way to screw these lot over is not by their pointless overpriced 'upgrades' in the first place and not falling for all the marketing bollocks.

 

This is where governments should step in. Why only 2 years.... why not, for example say 5 years? Its purely for $$$$$$.

 

In my ideal world phone makers would be required to warranty phone, tablet and laptop batteries for 5 years and provide spares to purchase for 10, the same way a lot of car parts are. I'd make soldered in batteries illegal too, but that's just me.

I think Tim Cook would die of shock if that were ever to become the case, so everyone would win.

 

How do you make older phones safe out of interest?

Is it at all possible or are they destined to lay in drawers or just add to the general environmental mess?

 

Non removable batteries are pretty much required these days due to serious restrictions on how unsoldered ones can be transported.
PDF warning:
https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Documents/lithium-battery-shipping-guidelines.pdf

And there is a history of batteries gone bad to "justify" it:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/sheu2/

 

That's 20 pages to say that batteries cannot be transported in bulk on passenger aircraft and that all batteries transported by airfreight must be properly labelled, cannot be packaged with other dangerous goods (solvents, explosives etc), must be packaged in a manner the prevents short circuit or crushing damage, charged to under 30% capacity and that each individual container cannot contain more than 35kg of batteries.

Half of that document is about proper labelling, which anyone shipping in bulk should do anyway. To give it as a justification for soldered in batteries is crap, all of those shipping restrictions apply to complete phones shipped in bulk as well, because they contain the batteries those restrictions apply to, the pdf even says so.

If that's really one of the reasons given it holds about as much water as Samsung saying they moved to soldered and glued together phones to make them waterproof, when they had already been selling waterproof, non-glued together non-soldered phones for two years beforehand.

 

Not being able to ship loose lithium ion batteries whenever and however they feel like is very much an excuse that is actively being used and it ain't just phone manufacturers ,for example you get the exact same excuse from amazon for refusing to ship a whole bunch of products to NI.
Also don't forget that what the IATA says is just the minimum standard airlines are supposed to have for transporting batteries, they are allowed to tighten the rules further, plus you then have the actual shipping companies like Fedex etc that are allowed to tighten them on top of that.