Why don't they make batteries hot swappable?

[drewsg]

Make an internal battery to run on, and a battery you can slide in and out like a SD card so you don't have to keep shutting down, restarting the phone and pulling off the battery cover just cause your phone has bad battery life.. aren't cameras this way? I could swear my kodak was like this.

 

[Drew5150]

Really? It's that hard to power down? At least you can swap the battery.

 

[bvbull200]

I would guess that both the cost and the extra space required are reasons enough not to bother with a feature that the majority of users would not deem necessary.

 

[s_special]

that would be cool

 

[Pioneer74]

Wouldn't even need an "internal" battery. Just a small capacitor to give it power for a minute or two.

 

[Draiko]

Wouldn't even need an "internal" battery. Just a small capacitor to give it power for a minute or two.

I was thinking the same exact thing... a small cap to give ~120 seconds of power. That might be something someone could mod into the Evo sometime later on...

...somewhere and somehow

 

[archercc]

Probably because nobody cares. Maybe once in a blue moon I would have liked this feature but not enough to take on the added bulk and cost. A capacitor or battery to reliably power the phone in any situation for long enough to swap the battery would be fairly large in the phone world, not to mention the extra technology needed to maintain it within the device.

 

[aaz110]

While I definitely agree it would be a very useful idea, I think if a phone manufacturer actually did that, they'd be committing proverbial suicide. Essentially, they would be telling you right from the get go that the "battery life will be bad" and "you'll need to carry around an extra battery". Even if that wasn't the case, and the battery life was amazing, I think it would still appear that way to the tech media and the general buying public.

 

[takeshi]

Added cost and complexity. Every person out there has some feature that they think wouldn't be a big deal to add but everything adds up. Devices are designed to meet a certain price point. Design is always about compromise. There's just not the demand to implement this feature even though many smartphones can quickly chew through batteries.

aren't cameras this way?

Neither my Canon EOS 40D nor my snapshot Nikon are like this.

just cause your phone has bad battery life.

I'm saying this because most people just assume that device X has bad battery life while device Y doesn't and there's nothing to be done about it. Your usage plays a huge part in smartphone battery life. Have you looked at the battery info screen to see what you can do about what it claims to be the battery hogs? There are certainly threads out there with suggestions on tweaks to squeeze out more. Just as it is with cars, the way you use the device matters even though some devices generally run more efficiently than others. Even a Prius gets terrible mileage if you leadfoot it.

 

[Demache]

I don't know why it would be incredibly necessary. Not having it adds maybe 2 minutes of inconveniece. Your battery doesn't die that quickly that its a common occurance, does it?

 

[No_u]

Companies are focused on keeping the devices small. That's what most people prefer. If phones were like 2mm thicker then they could have loads of extra power

 

[AndroidSPCS]

Yea this feature is rather way way way way low on the totem pole list of priorities.

 

[Palmetto Fellow]

I would have rather seen them design the EVO to work off a 2000mAh battery or something like that.

How do they figure out things like that? Do they build the phone, and at the end of that process determine how much space is left...or is it deisgned from the ground up wtih a particular battery size in mind?

Given more product development...I can see the EVO innards shriking as technology allows...thus providing more room for a larger stock battery.

Maybe the sequel for the EVO will have a larger battery..perhaps the components will become smaller, or they will figure out how to re-arrange the innards to accomodate a larger battery.

The Smart remote I have at home must us a capacitor of some sort...when I change batteries in the remote...all the settings to control different brands of TV, DVD, and whatnot are all stored. That being said...a remote control has much more real-estate to add a capacitor.

Or does that data get stores in non-volatile memory on the remote? I guess it could be either way...

 

[s_special]

Yea this feature is rather way way way way low on the totem pole list of priorities.

lol

 

[Sulfur]

Bootloops would troll so hard with this feature...

 

[wayrad]

Wouldn't even need an "internal" battery. Just a small capacitor to give it power for a minute or two.

That's what they did on the early Palms that ran on AAs...the memory was volatile, so taking too long to change batteries resulted in a hard reset. Now there's a compelling reason to have hot-swapping!

 

[wayrad]

accidental double post