TL;DR
- The European Council has ended its adoption procedure for rules related to phones with replaceable batteries.
- By 2027, all phones released in the EU must have a battery the user can easily replace with no tools or expertise.
- The regulation intends to introduce a circular economy for batteries.
Are there any devices that allow a replaceable battery and wireless charging? I know battery swapping can become common, but I also do not want to lose a feature that I currently enjoy.
Yes, we had this ability all the way back in 2012 on the Galaxy S3, which had NFC and Wireless Charging built in to a user replaceable battery pack. It was available on many phones in that era and could easily be brought back if we gave up some “thinness” that we have now.
If companies are smart, they will develop that feature and market the heck out of it as a selling point
you could easily add a charging coil in the back of the phone and just have some contacts
my fairphone 4 already has a pair of contacts on its back, with accompanying pogo pins in the body, although i think that’s just for an nfc antenna. still, the same system would totally work
I can’t think of any reason a battery being removable would impact its ability to wirelessly charge (though it would still need to be in the device to do so).
Exceptions for batteries that survive a certain number of charging cycles
It is a special day when there is happy tech news. This is a day for celebration. Having done my own battery replacements some have been a nightmare to do with all the glue and hoping the screen doesn’t break. I look forward to this, since with rise of phone costs I don’t intend to update frequently. I’d actually change my battery annually if it wasn’t such a hassle.
Will this impact water proofing?
Not really. Expect in that obviously many of the exact current water resistant phone design can’t be used. Since those don’t have replaceable battery. However already at this very moment there is smart phones on the market with both replaceable battery and water resistance. Like Samsung Xcover6 pro . Not that it is the only one, but example from the major brands instead of the more niche rugged phone specialist brands. In fact in my experience in the rugged phone market replaceable battery is quite common (and thus apparently desired by customers) feature. I assume on the rugged phone user segment liking the ruggedness of “I can continue the lifespan with new battery” and even “Well I’m going to middle of no where wilderness, spare battery might not be stupid idea”.
In opposite to the hurdurhurdur can’t make water and dust resistant phone with battery covers. Yes we can. We figured this out by early 2000’s. Touch screens on the other side of the phone taking place from the old numeric T9 pad doesn’t change the design fundamentals of the back of the chassis. Rigid enough cover plate with rigid enough pressure applying latching combined with rubber seal designed and molded to seal the desired areas will do the job exactly 2027 as well as those did in 2002.
As said all it takes is a redesign job with the battery swapping idea being kept in mind from start on the chassis design. Maybe it means couple mill thicker phones, since the phone isn’t a single glued together slab from front display glass to the back cover glass, so it isn’t rigid by being single monolith resign block essentially. However as far as the massively bulky thick rugged phones, all phones aren’t headed there. That is about impact resistance instead of water or dust resistance. Thick layers of metal and rubber both to withstand and to soften impact.
No, we have ip68 smartphone with removable battery.
Not if done correctly. There were some early Samsung’s that did it with rubber o rings on the back that helped keep the water proofing.
My old moto g (not sure which revision) had a removable battery and was water resistant. Used to use it for navigation on my motorbike regardless of the weather
Now we just need headphone jacks and SD cards and lineageos support and my dream phone will be mandated.
I can get onboard with (micro) sd card slots. But honestly I’m fine with not having a headphone jack. I never used it anyway. And wireless earbuds are way more convenient anyway because you don’t have a wire tethering your phone to your ears.
Edit: I should add that GrapheneOS is way more privacy-oriented and secure than LineageOS.
My YouTube premium downloads are on my sd card, which works out nicely.
I pretty much stopped using my phone for audio when they got rid of the headphone jack.
Wireless headphones still aren’t great and most are uncomfortable. It’s super annoying keeping them charged and they are so expensive when you consider how short their lifespan is.
I listen to certain YouTube videos to get to sleep and have for years and years. Wireless ear buds just aren’t in the cards for something like that.
I’m in a similar boat. The only time I do plug in headphones (via the usb port) is on nights I’m having a very hard time fall asleep. But I do that at the expense of being able to charge my phone 😔
Man, that sucks. One of the other things for me is that you can buy decent headphones for like seven bucks with a 3.5mm jack. Most USB headsets are going to be a lot more expensive.
Does your phone support qi charging? That could be a solution if it does.
Xperia phones have headphone jacks and SD cards. Pretty sure you can install lineage on them as well.
I’m not a fan of xiaomi (even though it’s my daily driver), but most of their phones fit your needs. In the past I used redmi note 4, note 9 pro and now note 10 pro and they’ve all been great.
Custom roms community really is something.
Had bad luck with China phones being open before, but when the time comes I’ll have to take a look.
Your force open drivers would be really cool.
Not having SD card is real painful.
Between basic storage being so much larger than it used to be (the 4-8GB days were brutal) and USB-C flash drives that can plug into your charging port, I seldom miss them these days
Still sucks that they removed them as an option though
I’m not getting my hopes up, but I’d like to see this influence the smartphones being sold in the US as well. One of the primary things that keeps me replacing my smartphones is battery life, so being able to replace the battery would be incredible.
Do you still have different charger plugs for each phone?
In my Android experience if you have an unpopular/old phone, years later many of the new batteries you buy aren’t much good. That or the radio frequencies change and you need a new phone for that. But still 4-5 years on a phone should be doable.
I remember smartphone days of old when you could buy additional battery packs, extended ones and huge lemon ones or something that would give you like 10,000 milliamp hours. Good times!
Because the EU is such a massive market, EU law tends to bleed out. It’s expensive to keep different SKUs for different regions, so compliance tends to seep out.
I’d expect at least some of this to have an impact outside the EU.
idk, apple is already ramping up their region locking systems just to get better about locking out non-EU countries for when sideloading is mandated in march 2024
We’re talking about substantial hardware differences, though, which are substantially more expensive to maintain than simple region locking.
yeah, absolutely, but at apple’s scale and stubbornness, i wouldn’t be surprised if they made a europhone that was intentionally thick and non-waterproof, supported sideloading, had a usb-c slot and a replaceable battery, and then they just made the regular iphone with their original plan (probably fully sealed with no charging port whatsoever)
i do want eu law to bleed out to everyone and finally fix up the phone industry, but the iphone is literally apple’s main money-maker, and regulation is cutting away at all the ways they optimize that revenue stream, by enforcing failures to increase the frequency people buy phones at, maintaining an iron grip on the ecosystem to sell with a nebulous sense of wonder (and also make switching away as hard as possible), and keeping a vendor lock-in through their ecosystem. these are all horribly anti-consumer strategies that the eu is rightfully cutting down on, but all of these directly prop up apple’s product line, so at some point it’s gotta be cheaper to isolate the eu and keep the phone to their specifications everywhere else.
And they know people are going to be importing these smartphones once it goes live and it’s not a battle that can be fought.
The company Fairphone makes almost perfectly repairable smartphones, but they’re only for the European market and the radios won’t really work in the US. I think it would be a similar case for a lot of phones so it might not actually be super viable to import phones in the future either, unfortunately.
Fairphone just partnered with Murena to bring it to the U.S. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair
oh damn! awesome! my current phone still functions well, so hopefully the next one has a headphone jack and I’ll get one, thanks for linking that!
I remember when iPhones first came out, they were locked to a single telecom provider. It got jailbroken within a week and every patch following it for over a year got jailbroken too.
If there is enough demand by big brands, unlike the fairphone, there will be a way to use it outside of the EU. Combined with the extra cost to manufacture, I don’t see big companies just producing it uniquely for the EU or even if they do, not for long.
It also means that other places can introduce similar laws with less friction. Like the GDPR and the various American privacy-oriented laws.
Yeah take that big corporations
While this is great will they also make the manufacturer allow external storage up to 2tb?
Great news, now require the producers to standardise on 2 or 3 different battery shape formats!
On a side note, I wonder if there will be a market for slightly thinner phones with non replaceable batteries imported from foreign markets.
That was my thought, you can’t maintain the size with a user replaceable battery. A lot of people would rather have a bigger phone with a removable battery but not everyone.
Haven’t phones been getting thicker anyways? I’m looking for a replacement for my Pixel 3a and the new Pixels and iPhones all feel like bricks in my hand
As someone who had a 3310, I’m not happy unless I’m wielding a brick that can kill a gorilla
It would have to be personal imports. Since the regulation concerns not just the manufacturer, but Any natural or legal person that places on the market product (that phrasing appears lot on the regulation 😆). So for example importers and distributors. A retail electronics shop is responsible to make sure they don’t offer on sale any new product with no replaceable battery. Obviously to their own amount of reasonable amount of responsibility. Retailer isn’t responsible to go check the product in detail for all the nitty gritty technical compliance, but they have to do due diligence from the manufacturer or importer on “and this product you offer us does fulfil EU regulations. You do have the spare batteries in offer like regulation demands, you plan to honor the 5 year offer period of spare batteries” and so on. Can’t be knowingly importing or retail selling non compliant products.
Good.
Although I support the idea, I’m not sure how useful this is for android phones. All android phones I’ve owned have long gone out of update support before the batteries have noticeably degraded.
Get a Pixel phone. 5 years of updates (technically I think that’s only for security updates, which, arguably are the most important kind of updates. Sure, new features are always nice to have, but if your phone is vulnerable to security flaws because it’s outdated that’s an immense problem)
Even better, get a Pixel phone and put GrapheneOS on it for a more secure and more private phone.
I have a pixel 3a. It went out of support last year. I have no need for a “better” or newer phone. I have dabbled with other os in the past with a pixel 1 and moto g, I should look into it again.
loved the pixel 3a. traded mine in last year when the pixel 6a came out because they had such a good deal of a $350 trade-in value, essentially making the new phone just $150 (which, sad to say, is low for a new phone. So I had to jump on that deal. Plus, with having a nonreplaceable battery it was time for an upgrade anyway since battery life was beginning to sufer.
So excited for the day when I can just replace the battery and keep using my phone (for as long as it received updates at least!)
4 years since the last update on my phone, I really don’t see why I would change unless core apps like Firefox were to stop working.
Software doesn’t stop working. Up to date software becomes so slow on obsolete hardware it makes you pull your hair out trying to use it.
Other than now lemmy, the only other apps I use are Firefox and email/messaging apps. Hardly need that much performance.
Security updates
Exactly. I don’t even keep a phone for longer than 3-5 years. The batteries on my last few phones were still great when I traded them in.
if this makes batteries smaller so be it
let’s go back to 2012 and carry a few of them at a time
There’s no need. Battery tech has advanced substantially. There is no reason phones shouldn’t last all day and then some, then when the battery becomes shitty, replace it instead of massive e-waste. We’re lucky the EU exist.
The battery is only one piece of the puzzle. If the EU wants to really reduce e-waste they should also mandate a minimum of 4 years of android security updates, preferably 5 or 6.
Google Pixel phones get 5 years of updates
Yes, but the vast majority of android phones get 2, maybe 3 if you’re lucky, and on the budget market you’re lucky if you get 2.
Very true, or mandate unlocked bootloaders so people can put custom roms that will patch.
Both is the real answer.
I’ve replaced iPhone batteries before and it isn’t that hard. I could see making it easier, but being able to replace without tools seems like an odd requirement. I’m envisioning every phone with one of those slide off battery covers which always end up breaking over time. It’s just one more thing that leads to flimsy phones.
There is no way most people can replace there smartphone battery with current designs.
I’m not arguing against making it easier for people to fix their devices on their own. I’m just not a fan of the “no tools” aspect. People drop their phones all the time. A “no tools” battery cover is going to pop right off and break or wear out. I’d rather have it secured with a couple screws.
It’s not actually “no tools”, it’s “no specialized or proprietary tools unless provided for free by the manufacturer”.
Appreciate the additional info. Thanks!
In addition to the correction from the other user - there are plenty of designs that provide access to phone internals with no tools. Snap fit phone bodies work fine, there are several modern phones with them and numerous older phones. Still water resistant, and the case doesn’t magically pop off just by dropping it.
(Also a case popping off from being dropped actually protects internals and the screen by absorbing some of the drop energy anyway, since the kind of drop that would easily pop a phone body off is the same kind of drop that will break screens.)
True. My Asus Max Pro M1 had that design although it didn’t have any liquid protection aside from basic splash resistance. Several Redme Note devices also had same design. I had always thought the back pannel was glued shut untill I visited service centre for battery replacement and they just popped off the back.
Can’t say I ever had that problem. I had several phones with slide-off battery covers, and none of them ever broke. Besides phones, numerous AA-battery-powered devices over the decades (Game Boy, etc) had slide-off or clip-on battery covers that, for the most part, worked fine.
So yeah, bring back the slide-off battery covers. They were great.
I don‘t know how to feel about this. While It’s nice to be able to replace the battery, I very much prefer the durability of todays phones over those flimsy removable back plates that used to be common in the 00s.
I really hope they mean that no special tools/skill are required. They should just standardize one type of micro screwdriver that everyone has to use.
Replaceable batteries inevitably also have to be sturdier s.t. they don‘t pose a fire hazard, making the entire phone bulkier or reducing battery life.
My iPhone XR is now over 4 years old and battery capacity is still at 80%, getting me through the day easily.
Before that I had an iPhone 4s where I replaced the battery after ~6 years. I was really disappointed with the new battery and ended up buying a new phone anyway after a few weeks.My phone is the device that I use the most by a huge margin. It doesn‘t bother me too much if I have to replace it every 5-6 years. And I‘m pretty environmetally conscious in general.
I get what you’re saying, but removable batteries and flimsy plastic backs don’t have to go hand in hand. The LG V20 had a metal back and a removable battery
Yeah I had a V10 and it was one of the most premium devices I’ve ever felt. And the best sound quality from a phone, too.
Gee, I can’t understand how my lgg3 is still in one piece, what with that replaceable battery making it so flimsy.
It’s almost as if I’m imagining it being able to turn on because it fell apart when I sat it on the table three years ago.
Good thing it broke back then! Otherwise, I might have spent tens of dollars on replacement batteries each year!
Not to mention all the tablets that broke because they were flimsy with replaceable batteries. The galaxytab 2 and 3 alone would have blown up from materials fatigue if I’d replaced those batteries over the years. Whew, what a relief I don’t have to have them in use as digital picture frames like I would have otherwise.
My Galaxy S5 never felt flimsy. It was even highly waterproof for the time because it had a COVER for the USB Port attached to the phone! It even had a gasp HEADPHONE JACK!
I didn’t know the USB port had a cover. I bought mine used but excellent condition, apparently other than the port cover. My S5 had a brief dip in a river and never charged again. :(
Good thing you had a removable battery so you could charge the battery outside the phone lol
It also looked and felt cheap. HTC did the best solution but back was metal so no wireless charging. I would prefer a back cover like the nexus 5 or lg g4
The Galaxy Xcover pro has a good durability, is IP68 and has a removable battery. It’s a matter of willingness.
Give me a phone with a removable battery in the style of the HTC Sensation 4G. Sexy, metal, easy to open and swap the battery. It was an incredible device that I remember using fondly.
Flimsy? have you tried the LG V20?
Of my last three phones battery has not been the issue I disposed. Mostly it is they grind to halt software wise as they fail to cope with newer apps expectations for storage or ram, I change my phone every 3 to 4 years.
Yeah those old Nokia’s are notoriously flimsy because of the removable batteries 🤦♂️
Yeah. If you owned one and don’t get all your information from memes on reddit, they were incredibly flimsy. It was all cheap ass plastic that was clipped in, they would break and your phone would be heald together by hopes and dreams.
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How much time do you think it takes to design a new phone?
A week, because a car takes 5 years and a phone is 1/250 the size of a car?
Solid logic
Hang on, I’m going to take five minutes to invent some nano-technology that’ll cure all diseases.
Why didn’t we think of this before?
