EU votes to mandate removable batteries in smartphones in a landslide; no more glued together junk!

Hooray! Younger generations will finally be able to experience the joy of dropping their phone and having to pick up three to four different pieces! /s

(I'm all for this change, by the way)

Oh I remember that with Nokias. It's like shock absorbing for cars lol.

Honestly, with Apple making it incredibly fucking hard to take out their batteries with excessive amounts of glue, I'm okay with this.

Do they not have the tabs you can pull out anymore?
- They do, but they're incredibly prone to breaking when you pull and sometimes they're just hard as shit to grip so you have to use a screwdriver to twist and pull.
  I don't think I need to explain why that's so dangerous.

Excellent! Batteries in modern phones are surprisingly definitely removable and replaceable. I've done it multiple times. However, the unfriendly barrier to entry is glue and clips that require careful prying with spugers. It's quite clear manufacturers are happy blocking you getting in; plenty people just buy new phones when the battery gets too old.

Fairphone 3 user here. My main reason to choose this phone a few years ago was because the battery could easily be replaced. Too many phones are perfectly functional but the battery is half dead. Another boon of non-glued batteries : You can carry two (or more) batteries to easily switch when the first one is KO. Meaning no need for portable charger and useless cables in your pocket. Phone at 10% ? Just change it, bam 100% in a second. Easy as that.

I'll probably not be the target of such regulations because I wouldn't choose an anti-consumer phone brand anyway, but at least it's going in the right direction.

Fingers crossed that this will be implemented well, im tired of having sleek electronics be irrelevant in 2 years when the silicon could go for 5 or six

The silicon could go on for decades if both the modem and processor were fully documented hardware that the community can access and support in the Linux kernel.
I can run a secure and current form of Linux on 30+ year old hardware if I want to, because the hardware documentation was expected by everyone at the time even if some end users were oblivious to what this meant. The whole reason google pushes Android is because they provide a base Linux kernel that hardware manufacturers can easily slip their proprietary junk into without requiring them to add the kind of open source code needed for mainline kernel support by the community. This is the mechanism that depreciates your device. It is totally artificial and an end user exploitation by design.
- It's usually not silicon on the PCB that fails, but the other electronic components (usually the capacitors) that fails first, and since they are surface mounted devices it's really difficult to solder them by hand.

Do y'all remember the days when you dropped your phone and it exploded into 3 or 4 pieces? 🤣 Those were the good days.

Three. Battery, cover and the rest. Weirdly, no damage to the plastic display. How? I guess it was the ~~weather~~ bezel
- Well, it was plastic. Pretty hard to crack plastic like glass
- And when you scratched up the back you bought a new one for $12. No $200 glass or machined aluminum cases that we put $35 covers on just to protect them from every day use.

Phones are getting more expensive so people are holding on to them longer, so it's a nice quality of life improvement to remove the barriers to battery replacement so less people have to go down to a phone repair store to get it changed. The more of a hassle battery replacement is seen the more likely people are to just upgrade and create e-waste.

The problem here is that in order for most people to be able to replace the battery themselves safely they need to be really idiot proof. We’d need to return to back covers with latches or big screws and batteries in cases and contacts. This shit is bulky, heavy and hardly waterproof.
New iPhones use lipo pouch with a ZIF connector straight to the motherboard with a “pull to release” adhesive strip hidden under a panel with a single use sticky seal and two small screws. There is no black magic in replacing the battery yourself and the solution is small, lightweight and waterproof. However most people wouldn’t even know which way to turn the screws to loosen them and probably wouldn’t be bothered by throwing the phone away and getting the one with a better camera AI and more emojis.
- [edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can't have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].

This is great.

If this goes through, I think it would be really good news. Battery failure is one of the leading things that force people to replace their smartphones, and having them be replaceable would go a long way towards making smartphones last longer.

I do miss being able to swap out a phone battery and this will certainly be a step in the right direction in terms ewaste and device longevity.

One thing that I wonder about is waterproofing or water resistance. Some phones are basically waterproof in shallow water. How achievable is this with a device with a trivial way to remove the battery?

The Galaxy S5 sport had a battery door and water resistance. They just used gaskets.
People make this argument and barely anyone really uses the waterprooding features of a phone
- You know, I really like my Essential Ph-1. It was a lovely little phone. I had the little 360 camera accessory that snapped on magentically and everything. It was so cool! Then, 1.5 seconds, dropped into water from which I grabbed it instantly, and it was done. No warranty coverage for dropping it in water, and zero waterproofing, and toasted phone. So, yes, more of us "use" waterproofing on our phones than you would think. The thing is that it didn't need to be this way. There were waterproof phones back before everything was glued glass slabs all the time. Galaxy S5 Sport as mentioned by @HubbleST@lemm.ee above (and other "sport" edition phones). We have a lot of hygrophobic coatings and tech we didn't have in the day of the Galaxy S5 series. We can do better now, if manufacturers are forced to.

I can’t wait to hear the Apple marketing word for this feature. They’ll add some gimmick like the battery is held in with magnets and say “We call it MagPack and we think you’re going to love it.”

This is awesome. Thank god for EU legislation that directly benefits me as an American consumer. Now I can microwave lithium ion batteries in peace!

And now they just have to force manufacturers to either at least security patch devices for, let's say 10 years, or force them to open source everything the community needs to continue supporting this device. It never happened to me that the battery died before support ended.

Just had that issue with my Pixel 3a XL. No more security updates. Had to replace it with a Pixel 6a but I liked the 3a XL more. It there was any community support for the 3a XL, I would rather sell my 6a again.

I might be in the minority here, but I feel this is actually a step back.

In the 5 years I've had my phone, there have been two times I've ever really needed to pull the battery, and still the hard reset sequence still eventually worked in both cases.

Anyone remember how some phones had issues with the battery door becoming somewhat loose over time, causing any slight bump to turn the phone off? Many have already commented on how they explode into multiple pieces when dropped. Traditionally the battery covers are incredibly flimsy plastic, even on flagship devices (cough Samsung). Waterproofing is a common concern too, however it actually can be done with a removable battery (e.g. Galaxy S5).

What really needed to be addressed here was how cumbersome it is to get into these devices to replace the battery, and how often people are price gouged to replace them. I believe this could have been better written to allow for either a removable battery, or a standardized and affordable built-in battery replacement process.

I actually love all these regulations on smartphones (mainly by the EU), like the recent USB-C standard. That one in particular makes it so much easier to share chargers around the house!

USB-type C to become EU's common charger by end of 2024
I mean... Sure, but we've had USB-C as de facto standard for many years now. When was the last time you saw a micro USB phone?

Holy. 👍

I wonder how thick phones will be because of this, what about phones with dual-cell battery? I know some of them do this for faster charging speed.

Absolutely nothing will change You can already swap the battery very easily, once you win the fight with the glue. Granted, most of the recent phones now allows removing said glue more or less easily, too. The only problem i can see are the IP ratings, as the backplate would need to be swappable
- I don't think the IP ratings are gonna be that much worse.
  The galaxy s5 had IP67 with a removable battery back in 2014.

How is this a win? My non-Android device is at 89% health after 5 years. I’m not going to replace the battery, I’m going to replace the device.

I’d prefer that we get paid $20 to recycle an old phone so that they actually get recycled.

Opposite boat. My perfectly good device gets replaced after about 4 years because it struggles to hold a charge. I don't give a shit about iterative phone specs, and I say that as a tech enthusiast.
Because not everyone has the same anecdotal experience as you?
@Brkdncr @Roman0 Why not both?
Easily replaceable for those who burn through capacity through heavy use. Which would also make recycling easier funny enough.
And pushing to make recycling encouraged. These aren't opposing ideas.
How is it a loss for you in any way? Just because the battery can be replaced more easily doesn't mean you have to replace it if you're at 89% after 5 years. I use my phone a lot and burn through batteries in 18-24 months. This shouldn't have any effect on people who only have light usage like you but benefit the rest of us tremendously.
It'd be like only driving 1,000 miles a year and saying there's no need to make oil changes easier to accomplish. Some of use have to change it orders of magnitude more frequently than you and would appreciate not having to disassemble the whole front of our cars to do it.
- Replaceable battery means extra plastic,extra size, and reduced design parameters because the design has to be around the battery and it’s ability to be replaced using connectors. Look at what blackberry devices looked like. Battery and OS tech got a little better, but they used the same batteries for a long amount of time. I’m not saying that we’ll have blackberry devices again, I’m saying that things like connectors, latches, and the extra size of a battery that’s designed to be held all adds up to extra space being used.
  My usage is probably above average. Probably closer to your average fediverse/redditor. I’m far from a “light user”.
  That being said, your average user doesn’t burn through batteries like you do. Maybe you should be pressuring the market to build your phone instead of forcing everyone that has no need for a replaceable battery to put up with the deficiencies of that form factor?

No it doesn't. you have have IP68 and a removable battery. What's not as easy it making them paper-thin as the battery needs to have structural integrity of its own.
My old Galaxy S5 was water resistant (IP67, 30min/1 metre submerged)
The rear cover had a gasket to prevent water entering the motherboard, micro sd, battery, sim etc.
Motorola Defy was waterproof with removable battery. A small switch locked the cover in place with a rubber gasket. This was over 10 years ago.
I've never understood the whole waterproof thing. I've never been in an instance where my phone was in any danger of getting wet. I get float trips and stuff but that seems like an uncommon case and even then there are ways to waterproof a phone temporarily.
- I don't think a phone needs to be 100% waterproof to 50 metres, but some amount of water-resistance is just good product design. Companies should not be encouraging people to dunk their phones in water, I think IP ratings sadly encourage this as well as some of the advertising around their water resistance claims.
  But having some amount of water resistance built into electronics helps reduce e-waste because accidents do happen. For more serious water activities people should be buying waterproof bags for their electronics.
- You don’t use your phone on the bathroom or the kitchen? It never rains where you live? You never keep your phone in your pocket next to a sweaty leg?
  I want a phone that can survive minor issues. I don’t want a phone that will die because it slipped into the sink while washing my hands or something like that. A degree of being waterproof does that.

This is actually pretty crazy. Wonder how much it'll affect the overall design of modern smartphones. Will we witness the return of flagships with plastic back covers?

Yeesh I hope not.
- I hope everything just becomes brushed aluminum ffs. I hate all these glass back phones

Really hoping this happens. I want to be able to replace the battery on my phone after a year because the performance on the battery degraded by nearly half.

That being said, I'm also willing to bet some time shortly after this goes into affect, the cost of mobile service (at least in the US) will go up another $10/$15 a month, and phones will increase in cost by another $100-$200. Not because materials cost more, or designs change. But to preemptively screw people over.

on the battery degraded by nearly half.
One year nearly half ? wtf , even my 24/7 power used phone lost approx only 17% on battery health and its a Poco x3 pro

Wonder if phone manufacturers will fragment their offerings to satisfy EU requirements or if we'll all end up with removable batteries.

It will be a pretty major redesign of the chasis and body to accommodate a removable battery and the cover, so I think it would make little economical sense to maintain two designs for every phone sold here.