You know that the mobile ecosystem is completely fucked when you have to open up your device just to do a hard power cycle.. and what for? What's the fucking difference between a connector inside of the device, and one that's outside the device? A couple of cubic millimeters? If it's even that much?

15 seconds.. getting better.

Wow. Why Is this a thing?

@irene not a mechanical switch (although I might add one at some point, that'd be quite useful), but a connector that goes from the batteries into the motherboard. My issue with this is mainly that there's no obvious reason why the battery pack couldn't be put on the outside, considering that there's a connector anyway. The case could easily be redesigned to have the battery on the outside, and given the size of common li-ion battery connectors from the time when they were still removable, it wouldn't be much larger, especially for a tablet like this one.

@irene because it's far easier to service. I don't mean outside of the case as it dangling outside and flapping in the breeze, I mean outside as in "behind a back plate but easy to remove without having to open up the whole thing", like the olden days of phones with removable batteries.

Essentially I don't want to have to get into the device to the point where I'm at the motherboard (with associated risks of ESD damage, ripping off display connectors during removal and so on), just to get to the bloody battery and disconnect it.

What phone?

@c3ypt1c Some old thing. Look at that board

@c3ypt1c tablet, Medion LifeTab X10302. Some random tablet I bought in an Aldi when they were on sale. I'm not using it much anymore now that I've got my vastly superior OnePlus 6T, but I wanted to get something on the 45° angled part of the ceiling to watch videos while I'm laying in my bed, without having to hold my phone (or worse, that tablet) on an angle. So I ended up reflashing this one and making it into a content consumption device, with MX Player Pro, FX to interface with my file server and so on.

@ScriptCoded well if "bought in 2017" means old 😜 I've zoomed in quite a bit, so the sizes of the stuff on the board can be a bit deceptive. The plate on the top left is a micro SD card slot and the one next to it is a SIM tray. The cushioning pad that I've highlighted is only less than a cm wide and a couple of mm deep. The actual connector that's underneath it is about 2x1mm.

(Sorry for repost, I figured that I might as well include the original but devRant doesn't support editing in a picture attachment)

This doesn't mean the *entire mobile ecosystem* is *completely fucked*, it just means they are designing some things badly.
Also, why do you need to hard reset the phone in the first place?

@Condor because if they do that,. you wont buy new device if battery goes bad.

@Condor Haha interesting 😅

@austudo
It depends if it will work when your phone is totaly frozen or not 🤔
If it wont, then it is a soft OS reboot. On the other hand if some kind of chip just does it instead of OS it is a hard restart. (i think in my lap bios does it. Even at system fuckup i can hold the powerbutton to force restart)

@svgPhoenix @austudo I was reflashing and rooting it, but the first attempt to flash Philz' Touch Recovery failed. So I softbricked it and couldn't get past the bootloader. So I had to do a hard power cycle to flash the stock ROM back on it and try again. Eventually it worked and fortunately I do know how this tablet comes apart, but it was too much to my liking.

Also, having to open up the whole device to replace the battery when it loses its ability to hold a charge, why should one have to do that? The design with removable batteries was just fine! But this non-removable battery design.. it incentivizes people to just buy an entire new phone every few years. Why?

@austudo in terms of modularity that'd be great, but I figured that I already have this tablet with better specs than a Raspberry Pi 3 (including 5GHz WiFi, which I've found is the only thing that doesn't stutter when streaming full HD video from my file server), so that's what I went with. Also, for this little bedroom project I didn't want to have any wires aside from the USB cable to charge.

I do quite like Kodi on the Raspberry Pi though, one of my Pi's is hooked up to my TV and it works surprisingly well 🙂 but it doesn't suit this purpose very well. E.g. I have yet to test if the Raspberry Pi can run directly off of 3.7V batteries (I don't want to have to keep a wire all the time to have the unit powered), I needed more bandwidth than 2.4GHz WiFi can offer, and I wanted decent CPU/RAM specs (octacore with 2GB of RAM in this case). So yeah... Maybe the Raspberry Pi 3B+ could be an alternative, but given that I already had that tablet spare.. meh. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Or you could have just drained the battery, even if the power button doesn’t work...

@620hun I really shouldn't have to do that though...

@irene as long as you don’t do it regularly it’s fine
@Condor you shouldn’t have to open it up either