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Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

> Replaceable Battery: Yes (with tools)

I am Looking forward to the Librem 5 since a while, but those specs aren't particularly promising. In general, there are three features I am missing most often in today's smartphones:

1. Replaceable Battery (without tools)

2. SD-Card Slot

3. Wireless Charging

Sadly there are very few models which have all three features. Requiring tools to change the battery is okay if you want to replace an old one with a new one once in a while, but not if you are on vacation, using GPS all day long, and just want to quickly change it.

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It's just one model of phone, so it's going to be really hard to please everyone. The items you mentioned are important to you, but don't matter to me. There are other things I care a lot about that won't be there either.

A good market for phones would include products aimed at lots of different bases, but unfortunately for FOSS phones we're not there yet. So my attitude is to support this phone, and hopefully move toward a world where there will be multiple FOSS phones with different feature sets.

Yes, I am well aware of that. Sometimes I wonder if I should set up a page with a poll to collect what most people would want as a smartphone. Somehow I have the feeling that phone manufacturers don't know anymore what the consumers want and instead build phones with 4 cameras just to present something new (and I am one of those who actually enjoy having a good camera within their phone).

> Sometimes I wonder if I should set up a page with a poll to collect what most people would want as a smartphone

you will get the specs of an high-end kitchen sink for the desired price of a Brondi.

It depends on how you set up that poll. You could attach a price to every feature and let the people decide which feature they want to pay for and what kind of price sensitivity they have (e.g. if they would accept a feature if it would be for free). After you collect the data you analyze the data (e.g. with a cluster analysis) and find out which combinations would have the largest market success.

It would be still hypothetical, but I would expect better (from my point of view) results than the currently available models.

You would be surprised. As long as "demand" is analyzed in the hypothetical, your results will be skewed drastically.

There was a grocery or meal shipment start-up based in London that had all analyzed demand by studying their potential user-base, yet their product never took off. Their result: a lot of people said they would buy, but never did.

The market itself gives you the results you're asking for: Manufacturers are definitely studying and trying everything feasible, since this is such a saturated market.

What sells is where people's priorities are.

Obligatory reference to Homer's car from The Simpsons.

This is why people think big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. are arrogant when they say they're making products we didn't know we needed until we got them. It's not arrogance; it's that their market research is infinitely superior to a simple poll.

With a poll, we're only constrained by our imagination. Real life has more constraints. The thing the big companies do: balance their research with real life.

Set it up! Then you can use the findings to influence manufacturers.

I agree, a lot of products seem that way.

Replaceable batteries are kind of a lost cause these days. You could buy some model-specific batteries and deal with rotating them around and charging them up and carrying them and rebooting your phone when you want to swap, or you could instead get a power brick that works with most/all of your devices and doesn't require swapping, and doesn't get obsoleted by a phone upgrade.

It doesn't solve every problem that a removable battery solves, but it solves enough of those problems that you're unlikely to see much demand for a removable battery anymore.

And remember that engineering the removable battery means engineering for a couple extra mm in thickness for the battery enclosure, which isn't needed in a tools-only or soldered-in kind of deal.

> Replaceable batteries are kind of a lost cause these days.

But, this is the signature open and hacker-friendly phone! Sure removable batteries have fallen out of style in the mainstream, but this isn't a mainstream product.

But I'm in their target market and I don't want a replaceable battery. I just want the battery to be serviceable when it wear.

For a given phone size, a replaceable battery require some additional space which means it will be smaller than a non-replaceable one.

I don't want to buy one or two additional battery to carry with me when I can get a battery that last a bit longer and that I can charge with any power bank. (mine or the one of a friend as there is no compatibility problems)

Users who want replaceable battery are niche in the niche.

I highly doubt this phone is going to win the thinness wars anyway, so the space savings aren't going to be as relevant. It would be much smarter to differentiate themselves on features such as replaceable batteries, which the mainstream market has ignored precisely because they want to chase thinness.

The real question is, how many users want replaceable batteries, and is there enough overlap between that group and the audience for an OSS phone. I would imagine the overlap is significant, but without market research on the subject I don't know if I'm right.

But you still want to sell it. And more so, you want to please the majority. Oherwise you might be killing the product by picking a niche.

You're just as likely to kill the product by not targeting the niche. Trying to please the majority puts you in competition with the big players. This phone's specs, with the possible exception of the CPU/GPU (haven't looked into it), are a downgrade from the 6 year old Note 3. The only saving grace at the moment is GNU/Linux, separated baseband, and hardware kill switches. Is that going to be enough? If the battery removal tools aren't as simple as a screwdriver, it's already lost me.

I think the thickness is just a minor factor, but there are two major reasons why they are out of style:

1. Making the phone water and dust resistant is much easier without replaceable batteries

2. The manufacturers want to sell smartphones and replaceable batteries are probably the single feature which extends the lifetime of a smartphone the most

The first reason alone would be good enough for many consumers to give up on replaceable batteries but combined with the second reason we come to the situation we are currently in.

I'd rather carry a USB battery pack instead of extra phone batteries. They're bulkier but can be used to charge anything.

As far as I know a microSD card slot would be present.

Things like wireless charging will likely come in subsequent iterations, but there's enough things to do already with the OS, software and the like.

If this sells enough, I am sure more things will be addressed in v2, but if we wait for the 'perfect' phone to buy one, there will likely never be a viable FLOSS phone. I pre-ordered to support the cause. If it's decent enough, I'd be happy.

Re 1: I would also rather have an easily replaceable battery, however for your use case I would think that a powerbank is more sensible than a second battery: no swapping/downtime and you can recharge both at the same time.

Sounds like fun taking photos with a powerbank connected to your phone ;-) In the past, I didn't have a problem with the one-minute downtime. Instead, I enjoyed having a fully charged phone within seconds.

Phone case with removable battery. I had a cobattery (now discontinued) case with my iPhone 6 - added a ton of bulk, but was useful to just swap batteries instead of charging.

Depends how hard is it to replace. If you're carrying around extra battery, tiny screwdriver should not be a problem.

Let's hope it won't be complicated, but somehow I doubt that it will be as easy as those normal replaceable batteries.

Does "with tools" just mean a screwdriver? If so, what's the big deal? Everyone's got screwdrivers.

It's mostly a matter of convenience and practicality. I can change the battery of my Nexus 5 with tools (mostly a screwdriver and a plastic prying tool), but I wouldn't want to do it away from home since it requires me to deal with small screws and needing some time to deal with small connectors that could be damaged if I was in a rush.

A common scenario is you're on vacation and taking a bunch of pictures and using GPS. You could bring your tools with you, but changing your battery involves 10+ minutes of careful disassembly/assembly and you need some space to work. You want this to be "changing AA batteries in a toy" difficulty levels.

How do you keep the second battery charged though? Surely a power pack which charges the phone over usb is way more convienent. You can get a small one if space is an issue or a massive one if you want it to charge multiple times. And you can charge it from any wall socket at the same time as your main battery, and it can be used for your other devices.

Batteries are more convenient because you pre-charge them at home, and then you just need to swap them in the field. With an external battery pack, you need to keep it attached to your phone for long enough to recharge - that's longer than several minutes, and it kinda gets in the way of actually using the device.

My Nexus 4's fragile cover (glass back and bits of plastic on the side) doesn't seem to have been designed for repeated wear-and-tear battery replacements. A 10 minute procedure does a little more damage each time.

So yes, the procedure should be "idiot proof".

For the battery, get together with someone else that wants the same and create a 'jacket' with an additional replaceable battery. And maybe wireless charging also. It would connect to the USB port. Such things already exist for various popular phones from the usual Chinese suppliers.

Are there any phones that support wireless charging and replaceable batteries? I would think that the wireless charging would make an easily replaceable battery much much harder to implement (and thus not worth it when so few customers care).

If "tools" meant some sort of screw driver I'd welcome that. If there are any parts that have to bend to open the case these will break in the long run and are less reliable in my experience (e.g. the phone's back would slide off when pulling it out of the pocket, experienced that with my old BB Q10).

Some really small torx screws that can't fall out of their holes even when loose would be optimal. If they also shipped a little screwdriver that fits onto one's key chain I'd be more than happy with that solution.

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