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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- These “repair” dongles are nothing more than a scam.
- The dongle is nothing more than a case with a light in it!
- There are a few things you can do to help look after your phone.
There are a lot of weird scam tools out there. Soaring power bills have made the “power saver” scam devices popular, but the other day I came across another odd one called a “USB Phone Battery Repair Multipurpose Battery Restorer Efficient Repair” dongle.
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It claims to do a lot, but rest assured, all it does is take your money.
Before I plugged it into any device, I took precautions in case the dongle wanted to do something nefarious. After all, the duck on the box made me wonder if this was some sort of Rubber Ducky hack dongle.
For the $5 I’d paid for it, that would have been cool.
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But alas, apart from being a useless scam, it’s quite innocent.
I tore mine apart, and inside is very little. Inside the plastic box is a circuit board, and on that are two blue LEDs and a tiny resistor to stop the LEDs from blowing up.
That’s it. The purpose of the LEDs is to illuminate a fake “display” with Chinese writing that says “under repair.”
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There’s a lot of Chinese writing on the back of the box, and a quick hit with Google Lens shows this to be instructions for how to use the dongle.
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Apparently, you’re supposed to use it for three hours a couple of times a week for five to eight weeks — by which time it’s too late to send it back.
There are a lot of “instructions” on the box.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
Even as scam devices go, this one is laughably bad.
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The instructions also include some of the most generic “speed up your phone” tips, which will do next to nothing, but that’s more than the dongle will achieve.
So, save your $5. Use it to buy a decent cable.
Also: This USB-C accessory gave my Android and iPhone an ingenious emergency tool
If you want to keep your phone in the best condition possible, use a decent charger and cable, free up space by removing unnecessary apps — especially bloatware — along with all those photos and videos clogging up your storage. Oh, and regularly rebooting your smartphone, as well as clearing your iPhone or Android cache, will also help keep it running smoother.
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