Removable Batteries are coming back
By a large majority the European Union has voted to bring back user replaceable batteries to mobile phones. This is fantastic for one reason, over all others. I keep my phones for years, not seasons. Over that time the battery health degrades. As it degrades the battery life goes from lasting an entire day, to lasting a shorter and shorter amount of time.
The issue at the moment is that if we want to replace a battery we need to take it to a phone repair shop, because a battery replacement requires the phone to be unglued, elements to be disconnected, the battery to be swapped, and then for the phone to be put back together. What should take a few seconds, with old fashioned phones, and rugged phones, takes minutes, hours or even days with modern phones. It’s often easier to replace the phone, than to replace the battery.
Rugged Phones
Rugged phones and feature phones still allow users to replace batteries. The process is easy. Unscrew the back, swap the battery, screw the back back in place. Done. I saw a comment that if phones have backs that can be removed, to replace batteries, then waterproofing will be ruined. That is not true. Diving torches, waterproof cameras and other devices can be opened, have the battery cards and memory cards removed, and replaced, and then closed again, without developing leaks.
Dead Phones
At the moment if you have a phone that is one or more years old you are stuck with the batteries that phones came with. Insted of replacing a battery when it gets old you are forced either to buy a new one, or, theoretically, go without a phone for a few dayss. The easiest solution at the moment is to walk with an external battery, to charge your phone while you walk, drive or do other things. You can’t simply swap a dead battery for a fully charged battery and back.
A lot of power goes to waste when we use external batteries. They waste some of the energy they get in heat so from 100 percent at the plug you only have 70 percent in the external battery. After this you get more energy loss when charging from the external battery to the phone. You lose another 70 percent. That’s 49 percent of energy from the wall, into the phone.
A New Market
We read about how awful it is for mobile phone makers, gps makers and others, that batteries need to be replacable because it means that they need to redesign their devices to allow for the swapping of batteries, to which I respond that there is an opportunity. With every manufacturer being in the same boat this is an opportunity.
if you buy a drone, or a walkie talkie, you get the option of buying a charger that can charge several batteries at once, outside of the device. This means that they can sell external battery charges, and more than one battery per device, as standard. In theory this gives them the opportunity to sell more, rather than less.
More Resilience
With old phones, if you dropped them, the back didn’t break or shatter. It detached. This made phones less fragile. If you threw a 3310 into the air, it could fall on grass, and even cement, without breaking, because it just fell apart. Phones didn’t have to be rugged, to be rugged.
With modern phones, if you drop them just once, they shatter. That’s why all of them are slim, and all of them are in cases. They designed phones that are so fragile that they’re protected. This goes against the purpose of a phone. A phone should be solid. It should be drop proof, for the simple reason that it is a portable device, not an objet d’art.
Phone size
One of the reasons that is used for not making batteries replacable is that it allows for phones to be engineered, without worrying about sim cards, 3.5in jacks and more. That’s fine, and it would make sense, if the phone screens weren’t so huge, in the first place. Phones might claim to want to be small, and tightly packed, but they need massive batteries to feed their massive screens. It’s not that they fit more into smaller and smaller phones. It’s not that they are designing the Nokia 8210 anymore. They’re designing what were once called phablets. (Phone tablets).
Rational
The ability to replace batteries in all mobile devices makes sense. Batteries degrade fast. Airpods need to have their batteries changed. So do watches, GPS units and more. If we can replace batteries for all of these units, then we can hike or go for bike rides with two or three small, light batteries, rather than one large external charger, that requires hours to charge, and only transmits part of the energy it was given.
This isn’t just about mobile phones though. Twice the battery on my mac book pros have inflated and I have had to get them replaced by a shop, after setting up a meeting, and then been without a device for a day or two. That’s the absurdity of the situation. If we can replace a battery on a laptop then we replace it, and a minute later we’re done. I await, impatiently for the ability to swap batteries.
And Finally
I have wanted the ability to swap and replace batteries in phones ever since I switched from the Nexus One to my first iOS device. At the end of the day, by making batteries user replacable they are freeing up valuable resources to do more urgent and more valuable repairs. Swapping a battery, for Garmin, Apple and other brands is a waste of time.
