Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfrumar | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad LG are sticking with a switchable battery - it's a must have feature for me. Lots of people have forgotten what it's like to grab a wall-charged battery, slip it in and run out the door with 100% power in a few seconds. Tethering your phone to the wall sucks. Clunky portable battery packs are the worst. I hope this phone sells well, it has my support.

View on HN

Honestly that sounds rubbish compared to just having a phone with a decent battery life in the first place. I used to think it was impossible (I had a Nexus 4) but my Z3C has an impressively good battery life - so much so that I rarely think about it. I don't even bother plugging it in for satnav duties. Also it charges at a pretty decent rate - probably takes an hour to fully charge from 0%.

Battery swapping is a workaround for flawed phones.

Depends how long you plan to keep your phone. Lithium-ion cells have finite lifespans, and if you plan to keep your phone for years at a time, or if (like me) you tend to purchase slightly older phones, removable batteries are a godsend.

FWIW, though I'm not happy about the non-removable battery, I currently use a Nexus 4. It's gotten worse over time, but I used to be able to comfortably get about 2 days of runtime on a full charge. Now it's about a full day, though it sometimes needs a little help if I'm in an area where reception is weak.

Well, if you're talking about giving an old phone a new lease on life with a replacement battery as a once-in-a-lifetime service operation, it's fine to break out the tools to replace the battery.

If you do battery swaps as a nightly workflow so you can have a day battery and a night battery, then yeah pop-out replacement is the only option

While it is of course possible to replace the battery in most phones with specialized tools, for some of the newer models it's very difficult to do without damaging the device. When we're talking about a phone you just bought on eBay with the intention of making it your daily driver, that's a hard sell.

All other things equal, I will always pick the slightly thicker phone with a removable battery over the one that might have me breaking out the spudger.

The specialized tools are a tiny screwdriver and a plastic pry knife on some phones - the adhesive doesn't come in until screen replacement. You can buy battery replacement kits with that stuff included.

Having disassembled the aforementioned Z3C a couple of times, I disagree that it's fine to have to break out the tools for it ever. It's a tough job, with lovely warnings like this one from iFixit:

"Warning first: Never try to move the battery unless it's broken and need to replace. Because there is very very strong adhesive sticker between battery and motherboard.And too much effort or careless operation will break the motherboard."

It's also difficult to maintain the waterproof seal when reassembling the phone. So while the Z3C has great battery life, you're essentially only going to have that for a couple of years.

The phone isn't quite the same once an unprofessional like me has opened it without guidance. For instance this nexus 5 on which I replaced a cracked LCD now has a little bit of give when I press the back. It used to feel completely solid before.

Yeah, this is because there's a sealing tape that's supposed to go to the frame after opening.

Original frames usually have it attached to the frame, aftermarket ones don't. Some tape or glue needed to close the original one after opening.

Funnily enough, for all the bad press Apple gets for glued together devices, the battery is trivially easy to replace in iPhones.

This is, I suspect, a byproduct of the fact that they handle (the vast majority of) their own frontline customer support and repairs. The most commonly-repaired parts are designed to make the process as efficient as possible for the Apple Store techs.

That's exactly it. Apple Retail iPhone 'techs' are relatively low skilled and low paid, and have a very small amount of time to do what they do. The most common parts, like camera, speaker, battery, screen etc. are made like Lego to make it easier and quicker for them to do their job.

I think this factor is more relevant today than five years ago. At least my upgrade cycle has slowed down, and I'm often subjected to poor battery life before the apps get too demanding for the hardware itself. Really frustrating with non-user serviceable batteries when this happens. How a phone feels like new with a fresh new battery, that "oh my god, how..." feeling with the battery life, just cannot be underestimated.

I agree - and I think most people's upgrade cycle has slowed. Most smart phones from 2012 onwards fulfil basic consumer demands (calls + messages, nav, apps, basic pocket camera).

Even if you upgrade your phone every three years, say, someone else will use it after that. Sometime back, I sold a phone that was 5½ years old when I sold it.

If phones had better battery life out of the box, it will help their current owner and the next owner.

You are able to get two days of run time on a Nexus 4? I couldn't achieve this even when new.

Replacing the battery on a Nexus 4 is a trivial affair(I am not saying this to take away from your non removal battery point but letting you know its pretty easy).

Two days of battery life was while using Sailfish rather than Android. I'd imagine part of that is due to the fact that Sailfish doesn't have drivers for the GPS chip in the Nexus 4, and therefore would never power it up.

Aside from that, I still get decent battery life out of it even in Android by carefully policing what runs on it. I have very few applications on my phone that run in the background, and I don't have the Google apps installed - I use microG instead, which is a FOSS implementation of (a subset of) Play Services.

I'm aware that the vast majority of users probably wouldn't like using their phone the way I do. That said, this should make it clear that battery life is very much affected by the software you run.

Extra swappable batteries take way less space than external battery charging packs. Charging cables are also a pain on the move.

Useful when out of charging range for an extended period, like when hiking or cycling.

Charging cables, adapters, dongles - these are all things most devices cannot go without, and which take up tons of room in luggage or bags as well.

I've been less then thrilled with Apple punting every design problem into a dongle.

Swapping a battery is measured in seconds. And not only that you can carry extras. Battery swapping is hardly a workaround.

Being able to swap the battery has been a feature in mobile phones for decades, I wouldn't buy a phone without it. Same with laptops. My current Apple laptop is eight years old and still going fine purely because I was able to remove the battery when it started ballooning.

I absolutely love not having to ever plug my phone in.

Plugging a phone in on a daily basis is a workaround for flawed phones.

I agree, having to swap your battery is a pain in the ass, but even with a good battery life in the days it's nice to have that option as a backup.

The main attractive of a swappable battery, to me, is replacing it 2 after 2 years of use.

Seriously? I do not understand this logic. Having to plug my phone in and wait 10 mins for it to allow me to turn it on is a pain. Running out of power in the middle of the day is a pain.

Forgetting to plug it in overnight and having no power for the day is a pain.

The <1 minute it takes me to swap the battery, even with the pretty primitive mechanism in the S4, is a total breeze.

I don't even bother plugging my phone in at night anymore really - because I know in the morning I can swap batteries and be out the door with full power.

Except now, three years later my battery life is less than a working day and I can't swap it out without hot gunning the case.

The rest of my phone is perfectly fine but I can either keep it tethered to the wall or scrap it. That said, it would be dead already because I did drop it in water and the waterproof case saved it :)

> This means that batteries of mobile phones, or other hand-held devices in daily use, are not expected to last longer than three years. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Battery_li...

I agree. I wish it had wireless charging like Qi, but metal cases apparently makes it more difficult to implement

It could be possible to add on via the modular slide out thing though

True. By the way, the Galaxy S7 is supposed to have a metal case but it still has wireless charging too so the engineering seems to be feasible.

In my experience the distance between the pad and charger receiver made a big difference, thus putting on a thick case made charging difficult to proceed quickly.

In the past, I had a phone with wireless charging, but mostly found it a pain. Putting it down slightly in the wrong position often caused the phone to not charge overnight, and the charging was just too damn slow in the morning when I realized that it hadn't charged overnight.

Wouldn't that have depended on that charger the placement and number of coils it had?

I had a very similar experience with the Nexus 4, but that was a known bad implementation and I wouldn't go for a phone without wireless charging like my Nexus 5 and my LG G4 with a sticker that enables wireless charging.

My Nexus 7 also has wireless charging which has been great because the USB port is broken, so I have no other way of charging. The lack of moving parts in wireless charging does mean less chance of breaking.

Palm really nailed wireless charging with the Pre. Magnets ensured it lined up correctly. And allowed it to be mounted on a stand at a great viewing angle.

Too bad about Palm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com