I remember when my mom had a phone with a removable battery, she would drop it a lot and it would separate into a gazillion components but it wouldn’t break. I miss the days
I feel like the parts separating had a lot to do with saving the phone as a whole. It must be absorbing and dissipating some of that energy from the fall rather than all that energy being directed into the phone when it stays together.
I remember my old phones would fly apart from a fall but they’d never suffer any meaningful damage.
Yeah, I think that combined with the explodey factor really saved a lot of my mom’s phones back in the day. In the absolute worst case scenario, there’d maybe be a bit of the corner gouged out if she dropped it on the road or something, but that kind of damage doesn’t spread and you don’t end up with glass shards in your finger if you try to use the phone anyway. Now I’ve gotta practically wrap the thing in bubble wrap to keep it working if it drops
Recently switched from a certain predatory fruity phone to a phone from a certain Dutch manufacturer that has removable battery and replaceable parts. At some point, it got water damaged, and the charging circuit stopped working. While I’m waiting for the replacement part to arrive, I can continue using it by charging the battery with a bench power supply. Feels good man!
Having worked in the industry at that time, there were 2 main reasons they did it like that
batteries were quite unreliable and failed often
mfgrs couldn’t afford to have one year warranties and send out field replacement units for a battery
And the reasons they stopped doing it…
batteries got better
battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
I think they should still be replacible, but they should have better connectors that are sealed off from the rest of the device. It costs a tiny bit more to do that engineering though.
battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
quite a feat, only doable if you try to make it fail
replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
this is in no way true, and is a bold face industry lie. There is no shortage of water PROOF and not just resistant electronic equipment that feature replaceable batteries.
the reason replaceable batteries were removed is entirely due to planned obsolescence.
not really, the phones we have are basically all water-resistant, so they definitely aren’t waterproof (makes you wonder just why this argument is repeated so much)
and it doesn’t require something to be bulkier to make it waterproof, unless you are deep sea diving, but I think at the point where you require over $100,000 in gear to reach said point, I don’t think a deep sea diving case is out of the budget.
the most common failure on a Bosh SPS drill is the actuator arm for the pounding motion, and this is commonly shared among several power tool brands with SPS drills.
you could make the argument that these parts just fail more often, and if you go by what broke, that would make you think it’s a reasonable conclusion.
Until I tell you that said actuator arm is made of injection mold plastic and all other parts of this assembly are made of steel. So in reality, this part that just happens to break more often is doing so because it was meant to, we are more than capable of creating contact terminals that don’t break as easily
They also had keyboards that worked well and there was even real competition for on-screen keyboards until Google bought out and dissolved the best keyboard because they really want your ducking typing data.
It didn’t have a removable battery, but I used to use an older Asus Zenfone 3 ZE552KL that really kicked arse.
It had cards slots, a headphone jack, a built in radio that used wired headphones for signal, and the damned thing was as reasonably waterproof as I could imagine a smartphone to be. It’s camera was pretty great for the price, too.
Well, one day it fell very hard on a sharp rock, and the screen shattered. The crack made a hole a few milimeteres deep, and it was about a centimetre wide. It might not sound like much, but the crack in the screen was very much there. My happy arse managed to then have it fall out of my pocket and right into the flush of a high-powered toilet.
I left it to dry for one day, and it worked almost like new again. It still powers up today, but the since security updates stopped years ago, i don’t use it anymore. IIRC, it wasn’t too expensive, but I forget if there was a sale going on at the time.
I hope I can find another phone like that around that general price point one day. I can dream haha.
i think he means those like commercial/hospital/doctor office toilets that, when they autoflush and you are still on the seat, feel like you are going to have your insides sucked out by the full concentrated force of a galactic core black hole.
I suspect that this was considered a feature when it was fist envisioned and technology progressed so quickly that you needed a new phone each year just to use available services. In that light, it didn’t matter if your battery only lasted 2 years.
Now that you can run your cell phone easily for 5 - 7 years, batteries are important again. Thank you EU for requiring replaceable ones in the future, you may have helped the entire world.
The EU, despite (valid) criticisms and pravacy mis-steps, is right now the only large, powerful organization fighting for consumer rights. I wish I, as an American, could support them, because the laws the EU is passing benefit me as well.
Bull. If you can get current in through the waterproof Type-C port, you can have a battery with a waterproof housing send current through some terminals.
I just don’t get this. I’ve had to get new phones twice now because the battery life got bad enough that my phone wouldn’t last even a single day on a charge, but I’ve never even gotten close to dropping my phone in water. Are people that clumsy that they loosely hold their phone when they’re in the bathroom or on a boat? It’s the same with dropping it in general - I’ve dropped a phone twice since getting my first smartphone in 2010, and both times it was luckily onto carpet. Yeah, survivability is nice, but it’s trumped by everyday usability.
The craziest part to me is that it wasn’t until they started forcing them to be stuck inside phones all the time that they started exploding. And yet the FTC still doesn’t give a shit
My only problem is the charging circuit could do with more isolation. When using wired earphones and charging from a wall socket there is some feedback onto the earphones.
A couple of years ago I got fed up with replacing phones because the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, so I bought a new-in-box, then-six-year-old LG V20. It has some problems, chiefly bizarrely poor reception, but by God it has a removable battery and a headphone jack! I was going to replace it with the Fairphone when that came to the USA but when I saw how expensive the Fairphone was, I decided to stick with the V20.
(The funny thing is that by the time I need to replace the battery, I probably won’t be able to buy one anymore.)
Add comment