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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how can this be economically viable...

This is paraphrased from last time it came up so I apologize for any inaccuracy:

They're reject cells from the manufacturing process. In manufacturing you have a specification your products must meet or exceed for you to sell them with a certain rating. Some fraction of the cells a factory produces don't meet that specification, so they're either thrown out or used in unimportant applications like this.

It's 3£, which is $3.88. For a 600mAh battery. You can buy an 8-pack of 2800mAh batteries (each) for $15 on Amazon. So the manufacturer is definitely making money.

The recycling part is potentially interesting. Whoever figures out how to get a ton of these discarded can make money by making power packs.

You can only compare capacity in mAh if the batteries you're comparing have the same voltage. If not, you need to convert to mWh.

A 600mAh 3.7V battery holds the same amount of energy as a 1500mAh 1.5V battery.

We're talking about lithium ion batteries. They are all about the same voltage.

Except the comment to which I replied was talking about '8-pack of 2800mAh' from Amazon. I'm pretty sure they're talking about 1.5v Ni-MH AA batteries.

Oh, maybe I shouldn't have given them the benefit of the doubt. Why would they talk about incompatible batteries? Weird.

You can get a four pack of 2800mAh lithium ion batteries for that price, though.

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