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Are all these nonreplaceable battery phones just throw away phones?

rifleman1956

Newbie
Apr 22, 2016
28
15
Just wondering about these nonreplaceable battery phones that we pay $700 and up are just throw away phones. Batteries don't last forever and some of these phones out there are real hard or near impossible to replace the battery. I guess manufacturers figure we have to get another phone after 2 years. I'm planning on keeping mine for a while. Hopefully the battery will last.
 
The short answer is yes, but not necessarily because of the battery. As @kate points out, any competent shop will be able to replace a battery for you and many can do it themselves if they are handy. The cost isn't really that high.

The longer answer is that most people keep their phones for only 18 months to 2 years before replacing it and current batteries should have a service life of at least two years. This usually means that battery longevity is a non-issue for most people. I have just reached 2 years of daily service for my Nexus 6 and it's still going strong. If the battery should start to fail, I would replace it in a heartbeat as it's been a terrific device and nothing available today is really exciting me.

The problem is going to be one of parts and updates. Eventually all phones will have no way to update to later versions or fix broken parts if they stop making them. Of course, I've got 10 year old phones that still work (as phones) so they can be useful long beyond their expected life cycle.
 
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Please keep in mind that a removable battery can only extend your phone's lifespan by a little time, don't buy a box full of batteries because there are another technical limitations like CPU and software. At some point your device will be slow beyond usable and you'd be kicked out of some services because your device is outdated.
 
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Eventually all phones become throw away devices. My wife used one of her phones for three years. After it no longer work reliably it became a play device for the kids. We factory reset it installed kid apps. It worked for them for about a year, before it died for good. My wife's note 2 after four years of service has been turned into the kids play phone.
 
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Anyway if you want to keep the phone longer than its battery's lifespan, stick with phones that use removable batteries.
Oh, I tried. I made a point of that with the Note 3. But nope. Android 5 broke Xposed, ensuring I was getting slammed with ads everywhere on that phone to the point I couldn't tolerate it anymore.

And literally nobody makes a phone that has one of these universal radios that employs a removable battery. That shouldn't be too much to ask, but it apparently is.
 
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Fortunately there still are good phones with removable batteries.
Maybe... unless you want to be able to switch carriers. At which point, it too becomes a throw-away brick, when all it should have needed (if they were more PC-like) was a swap of the radio portion that handles what bands it connects to.

But no... of all things, Google itself had to shut down Project Ara, which was about the best chance we'd ever have toward a fully modular, built-by-you kind of phone. For all the flak that iPhones get, one thing I can't take away from them, is that at least as of the 6S, not only is it compatible with every US carrier, but has more LTE bands supported than anything out there at any price point.

Meanwhile, LG already has radios that it has access to with support for all the US bands. they put them in happily with the Nexus 5X. But won't share them with any other model. That radio in a V10/20, or G4/G5 would have been a god-tier phone. But no, everyone wants to clone the iphone's looks, rather than be better than.
 
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Maybe... unless you want to be able to switch carriers. At which point, it too becomes a throw-away brick, when all it should have needed (if they were more PC-like) was a swap of the radio portion that handles what bands it connects to.

But no... of all things, Google itself had to shut down Project Ara, which was about the best chance we'd ever have toward a fully modular, built-by-you kind of phone. For all the flak that iPhones get, one thing I can't take away from them, is that at least as of the 6S, not only is it compatible with every US carrier, but has more LTE bands supported than anything out there at any price point.

Meanwhile, LG already has radios that it has access to with support for all the US bands. they put them in happily with the Nexus 5X. But won't share them with any other model. That radio in a V10/20, or G4/G5 would have been a god-tier phone. But no, everyone wants to clone the iphone's looks, rather than be better than.

Frankly that's only really a problem in just two countries, the USA and the PRC. Just about everywhere else, you can switch carriers just by swapping SIMs, provided the phones are unlocked of course. Even here in China now many phones are multi-mode, CDMA/EDGE, GSM/UMTS, TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE, FD-LTE, etc, and so can be used on any carrier and they've always been available unlocked, unlike the US.

Canadian carriers shut down their CDMA/EDGE networks quite recently.
 
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Why are they making it non-replaceable in the first place? I don't understand why they don't want us to change the battery.
Non replaceable batteries are usually thinner so you can make phones with reduced height. But the most important thing is that you can make the phone truly shock proof as you can simply glue the battery to the frame or screen, the battery of this type has a flexible power cable. It's virtually impossible to interrupt the phone's power by dropping it, in case of drop, removable battery will pop out of the phone just like the case back cover.
 
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Why are they making it non-replaceable in the first place? I don't understand why they don't want us to change the battery.
You can fit more battery in the same size device if you don't make it user-removable. It is easier to make an ingress-protected device as well, and one that feels "solid".

So it's not that they don't want you to change the battery (despite conspiracy theories), it's that they think that overall they will sell more devices that way. Basically there are more people who care about thinness or "quality feel" than there are who regard a removable battery as a deal breaker.
 
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