So my phone's speaker is dead and I thought of something

Quintus@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 25 points –

Is there a product out there that can be used in the way the picture below (or above) shows? A really small speaker that's in (or silighly bigger) the similar size of phone's built-in speaker.

16

This picture hurts my head. Why is there a penis?

Your phone doesn’t have a penis?

It's a male phone.

Phones have a biased sex ratio, so chances are you mostly saw female phones until now.

They’re called mini aux speakers. The sound quality will be absolute crap and it will stick out like a giant goiter, but they’re pretty cheap and easy to find. They used to be used for mp3 players and walkmans that didn’t have a built in speaker.

Be cautious about carrying it in your pocket. Bending over and sitting down with it plugged into your phone can put stress on your aux port and kill it, leaving you worse off than when you started.

UPDATE: Well... 15 minutes after making this post the phone fell out of my pocket and slided 20 meters away. Screen died. I guess I won't be needing the speaker now.

But I believe this will be good opportunity to repair it. It was 4 years old. Thankfully one of my backup phones, an LG G4 still works. Which is 7 years old and has Android 6 on it. I'll go and look for a custom ROM I guess.

Bad news - the bootloader on LG phones can't be unlocked anymore since LG pulled out of the phone market and disabled the service.

Unless it's already unlocked, no ROMs for you.

Does it need to be attached, or would a Bluetooth headset meet your needs?

Attached would be better. It doesn't need to have good sound quality. Just loud enough to hear the ringtone.

Found this from Google, can't make any guarantees about the quality and it seems a bit unwieldy for a phone unless you take it off to put it in a pocket.

Amazon

If you're not planning on upgrading any time soon, a repair shop might be a good option. A smartwatch is a good workaround as they can give notifications and calls but they can be pricey.

A pinetime is $30. It does notifications pretty good.

If that’s the issue what about just cranking the vibration up so you can feel and hear it if you set it down?

You don't want to fix your phone instead?

You just need a headphone attached to a trs plug. With most phones, if you don't use a trrs plug it'll keep the main phone mic active but route the earpiece audio to the headphones.