Non user Replaceable Battery: alarming trend

Most phone manufacturers have made it so that a combination of button presses will restart the phone in much the same way a battery pull does. (HTC=Power+volume up+volume down)

Personally, I'll live just fine with a non-removable battery. If I need to I can stretch 3+ days out of my HTC EVO with the stock battery. I can see how this would be an issue for power users who spend all day playing games though. I am with you that the choice should be left up to the user, but I'm not sure that's something that you can have a lawsuit over.

Vote with your dollars. Buy a phone with a removable battery.

 

For me it's not about battery life, it's about the lifetime of the battery. I wont buy a phone that I can't pop in a new battery when it wears out.

 

Never found this to be an issue even back when I was using dumbphones. By the time the batteries on my phones crapped out, I was ready to replace the phone. More often than not, it was harder to source batteries for my old phone and aftermarket replacements I've tried don't last as long as the originals.

 

I've needed to replace the battery before I replaced the phone on almost every cellphone I've owned. Batteries lose full capacity after around 400-600 charges. If you plug in once a day that's somewhere around a year and a half. Not long enough.

 

I have never needed to replace a cellphone battery.
It doesn't matter to me of the battery is removable or not.

 

Doesn't bother me, at all. At the rate technology is moving these days, phones are obsolete in a couple of years, and cell phone contracts give us new, discounted phones every two years. That's well before a battery designed with current technology will give out.

 

The battery on my original Apple iPhone (4 yrs old) is still working fine up to now. Holds its charge pretty well. Far better than my mom's feature phone.

If having a non-user replaceable battery means I can go 7 days without charging instead of needing to charge my phone everyday, I'd be happy to switch.

 

But how many cycles has it gone through? That's what matters.

It doesn't. Removable or not has nothing to do with it. Power ratings do and they are what they are.

 

Don't actively use it anymore. It's on pay-as-you-go prepaid service as a backup/emergency/car phone. Now you made me feel guilty about purchasing the Galaxy Nexus.

 

A couple of things to keep in mind about "cycles," used in this context:

1. A battery that's gone through 400-600 charge cycles won't have the functionality that it did when brand new, but it won't be anywhere near dead, either. Most of them would probably still have 70-80% of their original capacity; they'd need to be plugged in a little more often than when new, but still be quite usable.

2. The term "cycle" refers to a full discharge and full recharge ... it's not every time you plug it in the charger. Most people won't fully discharge their phone every single day -- though given the crappy battery life of some Android phones, some people certainly will. :/

 

It's not just this one point that is an issue to me, but the combination. First they had one year or 2 year contracts with $50 or $100 off for upgrade. Then it became a 2 year contract with $50 off. Then it became a 2 year contract with no additional money off. Now it is a 2 year contract where you pay $30 to upgrade. First it was unlimited data. Then it became throttled data after so much use. Then it became 2GB monthly allowance. Now it's batteries you can not replace. Soon, the grandfather clause will disappear.

 

Capitalism at its best.

 

As a former Apple iPhone user, I am used to not having a phone with a replaceable battery so I guess for that reason when I got the HTC One X, it really didn't bother me that it also doesn't have a replaceable battery. Having said that, I do think that it is silly of phone companies to follow suit and start producing phones without replaceable battery's. That was one thing about android phones that I felt was superior to iPhones. Not sure what they hope to achieve by changing to this way of thinking.

 

Once I get a new phone, I plan to give my Atrix to my dad and he will give the (older) one to my little nephew. So that would means I expect my phone to go through at least 3 generations (6 years if noone loses it). For a non-removable battery, I doubt the battery will last that long.

Also, there are people that cannot afford to buy the newest, latest and greatest. If they want a smartphone, they might buy a used one that's a couple of years old. Having a removable battery means that if the battery has lost its capacity, they can change it for very cheap.

 

Yes, it's the power ratings that matter but it's possible that a non-replaceable design would allow the use of higher capacity batteries than a replaceable design would. That's how ASUS first got 8-hour battery life on their netbooks. At the time, they also released a similar netbook with user-replaceable battery but only had 5-hours battery life. Besides, isn't this also the case with the Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR MAXX?

 

In a given size device, yes. Not a good trade-off to me. Given equal power I'll take a slightly larger device with a replaceable battery every time.

 

To this day it amazes me that vendors keep doing this. The HP Veer has no means to replace the battery. What were they thinking? I'm one year into the Samsung Charge and I need to replace the battery to get a full day out of it.

 

The non-replaceable batteries can be larger (more capacity) because there's no need for the cage/carrier that holds them. The cage/carrier takes up a fair amount of space. Battery technology being what it is today, phone makers are trying to give customers what they want.....longer and longer battery life.

I want replaceable batteries, so I think a trade-off would be for manufacturers to make these devices such that a technician could replace these batteries. I've seen many devices that would be seriously damaged if a tech tried to replace the battery. That CAN be avoided by better design/manufacturing. But that also means devices could have a much longer life span....and the retailers don't want to let that to happen!!

Our current state of affairs is to sell throw-away devices to force more sales. Very sad, but true.

 

In parts of the world where phones are sold unsubsidized, I can definitely see people wanting to extend the life of their devices, and thus choosing to opt for a replaceable battery ... and I think that if enough people continue to do that, companies will still make at least some phones with removable batteries.

In countries where phones are sold with a carrier subsidy (like the US), though, I can see removable batteries becoming rarer and rarer ... and in real-world terms I still don't think that's going to be too much of an issue. Definitely not speaking about anyone in this thread, at all (because I don't know where you're from), I've always thought that the complaints of "I can't affort a new smartphone" from US customers were a little disingenuous, at best, for a couple reasons:

1. Most companies have free or very low-cost smartphones available on contract. Not everyone needs to go for the top-of-the-line $300 Galaxy. Heck, you can even get an iPhone for free nowadays.

2. If you have a smartphone, you need a data plan to make it useful, and most carriers require it. If you use the data plan enough that you have to worry about battery life, your plan is probably costing you at least $30 a month ... which comes out to $720 over the life of a two-year contract. The cost of the device pales in comparison, and the cost of the data suggests that if you're broke, you can't afford a smartphone anyway.

 

It's the forced data plans that make smartphones expensive. As you said, you can get plenty of free smartphones (even iPhone) on contract but I know a lot of folks who forgo smartphones for feature phones because they don't want to pay the mandatory $20~30/month minimum for data plans (comes out to $480~720 over the life of the contract).

Besides, prepaid options that don't require data plans do exist. Good for folks who don't always need to have internet on their phones or have easy access to wi-fi. With today's economy, I see more and more people moving to prepaid so I'd say this is a valid complaint.