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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

It's a thinness issue.

If you want a removable battery you have to build a clip or latch system to allow the battery to be removable as well as a component shielding so that grubby little fingers don't go in there gumming up the works. Finally, a removable battery will have different receptors on it to allow it to be more easily swapped by laymen as opposed to a ribbon cable which takes a bit more finesse.

You CAN replace the battery in these units..you just have to be better at your job than your grandmother replacing her cordless phone battery.

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The N5 is thicker than the galaxy s4, which has a removable battery and sdcard slot. It's likely more a decision driven by part count and assembly costs. I don't understand why the market doesn't demand this either. It was certainly a major driver of my phone choice.

> I don't understand why the market doesn't demand this either.

The only time I ever used a removable battery is to cut power to my phone to do a hard reboot because it stalled.

While this is useful, I wouldn't pay extra for it nor would it be a deciding factor.

SD Card? Why? What do you people put on your phones? I'm lucky if I break 3GB with apps. Photos, movies, etc. on Dropbox where I have 70GB worth of stuff.

If you load a buttload of mp3s on there and / or a small library of movies and tv shows, then 16GB is not that much. Especially once you add in a few hundred photos at 3 or 4MB a pop. And some of the more graphically intense games out now surpass the 1GB mark.

And various social media apps have fairly large local caches. Examples include instagram, tumblr, and vine.

So if you're just using a bunch of cloud services you don't need a lot of space, but not everyone uses their mobile that way.

Exactly. I have a 64gb SD card and a dedicated battery charger with three extra batteries.

As lame as it might seem I just keep a spare battery with me at all times when the unexpected happens and I'm out later than usual or just use my phone too much.

I guess a case with a battery built in work work just as well, but I'm not willing to add the extra bulk.

Keep a spare micro USB battery and you can charge almost any device. Good for emergencies though indeed not quite as convenient for a single gadget like this. Pro tip: you can get micro USB adapters for lightning. ;-)

Oh and get the 32GB model, that was obvious to me....

I can't count how many times I've had to hard reboot this way. And only 3gb of photos and movies (no music?), come on.

And whats worse is that if your streaming it, your gonna be eating your battery even more.

I've found that my nexus four has a "hard poweroff" mode when you hold the power button down for five seconds or so.

15 seconds, but yes, this should always work.

You sound a lot like someone who never needs their phone to go for longer than a day without recharging and spends their whole time in an area of good signal.

I imagine most of "the market" just don't care about it. Given the speed new phones are coming out, by the time the battery has degraded to the point it's worth doing something about, they'd rather have a new phone than spend a nontrivial amount on their old phone. I know that'd be my choice.

S4 has AMOLED display and N5 has LCD (LCDs are thicker than AMOLEDs). That's why S4 has space for the battery latch and N5 doesn't.

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