New EU rules for making batteries easier to remove and replace

[strajk-]

About damn time, I always go on a rant whenever adjacent news get posted about this here, screw the madness of using glue everywhere for waterproof ratings, give us screws or pop off slots again, easy to replace batteries NOW.

[D13H4RD]

4 minutes ago, strajk- said:

About damn time, I always go on a rant whenever adjacent news get posted about this here, screw the madness of using glue everywhere for waterproof ratings, give us screws or pop off slots again, easy to replace batteries NOW.

They can probably retain the IP rating anyway. And probably do it better than the Galaxy S5.

 

They might not even do it like the older Samsung phones, but something more akin to the iPhone 4, where unscrewing 2 screws and sliding off the glass back was all you needed to do.

[suicidalfranco]

18 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

 

Bruh? Man's literally said that his old S4 literally needed the ability to swap the battery easily because it would struggle to last the day due to his use case, so he needed a quick battery swap to get back to 100% in seconds.

 

I did not find a sentence where he attributed his weak battery to the fact that it is easily removable...

 

"then again it needed the ability"

as in the phone had to have a replaceable battery to because without it it wouldn't reach a days worth of usage. followed by praise for glued in batteries and battery packs

 

[williamcll]

Would be nice if phones are screwed on instead. This makes sure it's still waterproof but also removable.

[D13H4RD]

17 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

 

"then again it needed the ability"

as in the phone had to have a replaceable battery to because without it it wouldn't reach a days worth of usage. followed by praise for glued in batteries and battery packs

 

In his defense, the GS4 was never really great with battery. It was par for the course for most non-phablet devices at the time, where it could last a day unless you were in certain circumstances where it would struggle.

 

The HTC One M7 was even worse. I had one and there were times where it would struggle to reach 4pm on an 8-4 shift. Since it also had a sealed case, it basically needed a battery pack.

 

On that note though, good battery capacities and being easily replaceable are not mutually exclusive. I feel like Framework is already a good modern example of that on a much grander scale.

[suicidalfranco]

Just now, D13H4RD said:

In his defense, the GS4 was never really great with battery. It was par for the course for most non-phablet devices at the time, where it could last a day unless you were in certain circumstances where it would struggle.

 

The HTC One M7 was even worse. I had one and there were times where it would struggle to reach 4pm on an 8-4 shift. 

and you are forgetting that in the time of the S4, mobile SoC were inneficient and known to over heat, at the time neither google or samsung had started to provide software solutions to increase battery life, that apps become more power hungry has times moves on and that even if you decided to settle with a glued in battery back then, you'd be lucky to find a phone that came with more than 2600 mAh of battery, which was the size of the S4's.

 

On topic: also agree on form factor standardization of battery packs, the fact that manufacturer can't even latch on to one form from one generation to the other is one of the dumbest thing ever. Specially when all the change is the position of the contacts just because. Standardizing batteries would make replacing even easier since you'd only need to search for X battery and not compatible battery for OEM brand X used in phone model Y

[D13H4RD]

1 minute ago, suicidalfranco said:

and you are forgetting that in the time of the S4, mobile SoC were inneficient and known to over heat, at the time neither google or samsung had started to provide software solutions to increase battery life, that apps become more power hungry has times moves on and that even if you decided to settle with a glued in battery back then, you'd be lucky to find a phone that came with more than 2600 mAh of battery, which was the size of the S4's.

Nah, I hadn't really forgotten just how stupid inefficient these old SoCs used to be. I remembered how much of a hot potato my One M7 was.

 

It was basically just XPERIAs and some oddball phones at the time where they had larger than average battery capacities of the time. 2100-2600 was about the norm at the time for non-phablets regardless of whether it was sealed in or hidden behind an easily removable back cover.

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD said:

And probably do it better than the Galaxy S5.

Galaxy S5 was pretty much sufficient to survive everyday abuse, hell even taking the darn thing to swimming. Anything more than that is plain stupid....

[D13H4RD]

9 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Galaxy S5 was pretty much sufficient to survive everyday abuse, hell even taking the darn thing to swimming. Anything more than that is plain stupid....

It's more in the sense of "why stop at IP67".

 

I think it's very possible to do IP68 whilst keeping the device relatively easy to access key components like the battery. IP67 is already more than sufficient for many, it's more in the case of "can we do it further without compromising on repairability".

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, D13H4RD said:

It's more in the sense of "why stop at IP67".

Why not? Everything above that is doing things that a mobile phone was never intended for....

[mr moose]

I personally need a phone that can be submersed for the multiple times a day I fall into puddles.   Between the office and home I must get drenched at least twice, and we all need to swim through the supermarket.  Hell,  sometimes I just pour a bucket of water over me for comic relief.

 

high IP ratings on phones are just marketing, the number of people who actually need it are so few and far between they can buy one of the many specific tough phones intended for such use cases.  The rest of the market (and environment) would benefit magnitudes more from replaceable/repairable components than being waterproof.

 

 

[vertigo220]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

I personally need a phone that can be submersed for the multiple times a day I fall into puddles.   Between the office and home I must get drenched at least twice, and we all need to swim through the supermarket.  Hell,  sometimes I just pour a bucket of water over me for comic relief.

 

high IP ratings on phones are just marketing, the number of people who actually need it are so few and far between they can buy one of the many specific tough phones intended for such use cases.  The rest of the market (and environment) would benefit magnitudes more from replaceable/repairable components than being waterproof.

 

 

You don't need it until you do. I killed a great phone once by forgetting it was in my pocket and jumping in a pool. At the very least, phones need to be water-resistant to allow sanitization with alcohol. Granted, most people probably rarely clean their phones, and even then probably with a towel or something, but for those of us that don't want to carry around petri dishes... They also have to at least be able to survive use in rain. But I agree, the ability to be submerged isn't useful to the vast majority of people the majority of the time; it's just nice to have for those oops moments. It seems like they should be able to do both, make it waterproof until opened to replace the battery.

[Gamer Schnitzel]

At the very least companies need to change batteries at the customer's request at cost without a penny of mark-up since they are going to argue that the phones won't be waterproof anymore.

[Quackers101]

lol, cars not included. software locks maybe okey.

[Arika]

13 hours ago, mr moose said:

I personally need a phone that can be submersed for the multiple times a day I fall into puddles.   Between the office and home I must get drenched at least twice, and we all need to swim through the supermarket.  Hell,  sometimes I just pour a bucket of water over me for comic relief.

i don't know about you, but i charge my phone in the dishwasher while it's running. so i $100% need a IP69 rated phone.

 

i love my fragile little glass rectangle that is teetering on the edge of snapping whenever it's in the pocket on my skinny jeans, just so it can be thinner than last years model. Why would i want a replaceable battery and MORE PORTS when i can just worry about the thing snapping at any point during the day because it felt like it.

[vertigo220]

21 minutes ago, Arika S said:

i love my fragile little glass rectangle that is teetering on the edge of snapping...

Ok, so a bit OT, but can we please also address the ridiculous need of manufacturers to make these fragile, expensive devices as slippery as humanly possible? Making them out of all glass so they're harder to grip and don't stay in your pocket or where you set them. The number of times I've set my phone on the bed only to have it somehow slide several inches to the edge and fall off, or had it in my pocket (dress pants, not an issue with jeans) only to slide out every...single...time I get in my car and fall to the floor (luckily hasn't fallen outside the car...yet). I suspect 2023 will be the year of Teflon-coated phones. Or is it really just me?

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, vertigo220 said:

Ok, so a bit OT, but can we please also address the ridiculous need of manufacturers to make these fragile, expensive devices as slippery as humanly possible? Making them out of all glass so they're harder to grip and don't stay in your pocket or where you set them. The number of times I've set my phone on the bed only to have it somehow slide several inches to the edge and fall off, or had it in my pocket (dress pants, not an issue with jeans) only to slide out every...single...time I get in my car and fall to the floor (luckily hasn't fallen outside the car...yet). I suspect 2023 will be the year of Teflon-coated phones. Or is it really just me?

That's not unique to phones.

Game controllers, headphones, etc also have a tendency to crash to the floor because they lack the necessary friction to stay in place.

 

(I mean good grief I've dropped my Stadia controller on the floor at least twice a day because it literately slides off the desk just from hammering on the keyboard.)

 

What should be standard, or semi-standard is where "finger grips" are on all phones (Eg just above the center of the phone) so that universal "phone mount"'s can grab the phone without crushing the glass backs of glass phones. But this is a nitpick of the bar-of-soap many Apple portable devices are.

[Arika]

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

That's not unique to phones.

Game controllers, headphones, etc also have a tendency to crash to the floor because they lack the necessary friction to stay in place.

 

(I mean good grief I've dropped my Stadia controller on the floor at least twice a day because it literately slides off the desk just from hammering on the keyboard.)

 

What should be standard, or semi-standard is where "finger grips" are on all phones (Eg just above the center of the phone) so that universal "phone mount"'s can grab the phone without crushing the glass backs of glass phones. But this is a nitpick of the bar-of-soap many Apple portable devices are.

I never used to use phone cases until i got one with a glass back....literally impossible to hold onto without feeling like it will just disappear out of my hanf.

[mr moose]

17 hours ago, vertigo220 said:

You don't need it until you do. I killed a great phone once by forgetting it was in my pocket and jumping in a pool. At the very least, phones need to be water-resistant to allow sanitization with alcohol. Granted, most people probably rarely clean their phones, and even then probably with a towel or something, but for those of us that don't want to carry around petri dishes... They also have to at least be able to survive use in rain. But I agree, the ability to be submerged isn't useful to the vast majority of people the majority of the time; it's just nice to have for those oops moments. It seems like they should be able to do both, make it waterproof until opened to replace the battery.

You can kill just about anything by accident.  leave it on the roof, drop it in a drop dunny,  lose it out the window when travelling down the freeway.  Should phones all be made to survive these rare events too?

 

Honestly, My first phone was in 1992. Since then of all the phones I have had the only ones that ever broke or stopped working due to simple things like water or dirt have been all the smart phones made in the last 5-7 years (or there abouts).  They used to be able to survive in the rain just fine with clip in battery packs..  Hell, even my motorola MicroTac was built so the back of the phone was the battery pack.  When they make them like that they can easily make them water proof and have easily swapable batteries.

[NumLock21]

My old Asus phone has a removable battery. Back cover is secure by clips that easily pops off but the battery is under the plastic housing secure by screws. still accessible, it just takes time, even changed it once and it let me used if for another year or so, until under layer of the screen developed a microscopic crack that eventually grew to the entire length of the phone, that made half of the screen unusable. I have no idea how did that happened, when the very top layer where you tap your fingers on is perfectly fine, and there is no signed of any physical damages.

[vertigo220]

7 hours ago, mr moose said:

You can kill just about anything by accident.  leave it on the roof, drop it in a drop dunny,  lose it out the window when travelling down the freeway.  Should phones all be made to survive these rare events too?

Of course not, which is why I said they should at least be water-resistant enough to clean and use in the rain, as those are common things. But they should do everything reasonable, which is why they keep making strong glass, and water-resistance/proofing is no different, and I don't see why it should be mutually-exclusive to replaceable batteries. If they can do it, they should, just not at the expense of that. Unfortunately, a lot of this deals with voting with your wallet, and people have voted that they don't really care about removeable batteries and that they want thin, fancy, glass phones. And now it's to the point there's practically nothing left to "vote" against that.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, vertigo220 said:

 and I don't see why it should be mutually-exclusive to replaceable batteries.

It's not, they can do it and have been doing it for decades now.  This idea that you need to glue in a battery for waterproofing is at best an internet trope that won't die and at worst a seeded marketing ploy by companies who don't want their devices to be easily maintained.

 

3 hours ago, vertigo220 said:

If they can do it, they should, just not at the expense of that. Unfortunately, a lot of this deals with voting with your wallet, and people have voted that they don't really care about removeable batteries and that they want thin, fancy, glass phones. And now it's to the point there's practically nothing left to "vote" against that.

Consumers never vote with their wallet, they always vote with either social conformity or what ever is easiest right this second.   Knowledge be damned, environment be damned.

 

[vertigo220]

53 minutes ago, mr moose said:

It's not, they can do it and have been doing it for decades now.  This idea that you need to glue in a battery for waterproofing is at best an internet trope that won't die and at worst a seeded marketing ploy by companies who don't want their devices to be easily maintained.

That's what I'm saying, it's the latter. There's no reason it can't be done, but manufacturers want people to believe that's the reasoning. Even if it's easier and cheaper to do it that way to achieve waterproofing, it should still be possible and reasonably easy to replace the battery, even if that would negate the waterproofing.

 

54 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Consumers never vote with their wallet, they always vote with either social conformity or what ever is easiest right this second.   Knowledge be damned, environment be damned.

Those are the reasons for their purchasing decisions, but ultimately they are voting with their wallets by making the choices they do for those reasons. They're telling manufacturers they want choice A over choice B, and so the manufacturers move more and more toward A. Of course, that's not to say the manufacturers don't also lead the consumers, because they do, or that there aren't other factors, like maybe phone A has a non-removeable battery with a modern CPU and plenty of RAM and storage whereas choice B has a removeable battery but a 4-year-old CPU and half the RAM and storage, which is what happens all the time with the various Linux phones like Pine and other underdogs. I'd love to go with one of those options, but the specs are always downright awful, not to mention they usually have terrible screen-to-body ratios and other poor aspects. If someone made a modern, halfway decent phone that runs Linux and works well and doesn't cost a fortune, I'd buy one right now, but they don't.

[Dracarris]

On 12/23/2022 at 6:23 PM, Kisai said:

Yet, your device goes to the landfill/shredder once it's 2 years old because they don't make batteries for it, even though it could have a serviceable life of 10 years.

I have no clue what kind of devices that would be. I have replaced glued-in batteries of glued phones that were 5-6years old. All it took was a simple online order of 25$ or so.

 

Also, there are tons of places that offer one-stop solutions for almost any battery replacement. So with an investment of 30-60$ (for phones) every 2-3years you can extend the service time of your device as you see fit. And all these shops seem to have more than enough customers to stay in bussiness, so I call this whole devices-in-landfill-due-to-"non-replaceable"-batteries BS for the millionth time. Please no BS counter arguments without any factual backing such as "most people will ..", thanks.

On 12/25/2022 at 11:33 AM, mr moose said:

high IP ratings on phones are just marketing, the number of people who actually need it are so few and far between they can buy one of the many specific tough phones intended for such use cases.

This has always been the worst and blatantly wrong counter-argument in this whole discussion. IP ratings are not for intentionally swimming with your phone on a daily basis, they are there in order to prevent one of the most common type of damage, liquid damage, as I and others have explained countless times on this forum.

"I don't see no use in this feature, so it's stupid and nobody needs it"

[Kisai]

44 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

I have no clue what kind of devices that would be. I have replaced glued-in batteries of glued phones that were 5-6years old. All it took was a simple online order of 25$ or so.

 

Please. Try to get your device manufacturer to send you "Just the battery". They will not. You've missed the point.