Jeez. Why do you think that ultra-durability is to make it easy to change the batteries? Ultra-durability is for the situations when I drop my phone by accident and instead of breaking it, it survives the drop.

And I don't understand certain folks' obsession with changeable batteries. You need to have those stupid opening compartment for batteries which always breaks down. I also remember that when my Blackberry used to hang, I would have no choice but to remove the batteries so that I can reset it. The on/off switch has always worked if my iPhone gets stuck up. Says a lot about how solid iOS is.

> Why do you think that ultra-durability is to make it easy to change the batteries?

What? Why do you think I think that?

Because that's the only way to parse the durability of glass being mooted by the fixedness of the battery. Maybe you meant "until I can swap the battery, I don't care what changes they make to the case" or something similar? It's genuinely a confusing point as currently phrased.

I parsed it as "The overall lifetime of a phone is generally limited by the death of it's battery rather than the glass. If the battery could be replaced, the durability of components would be more of an issue."

That's how I parsed it. Not sure why you are being downvoted, except perhaps people being annoyed because the inability to replace the iPhone battery is an old complaint that they've all heard before. But I think it's a legitimate point.

I downvoted him because I couldn't understand him. You're a lot easier to parse.

I'd take a non-removable battery any day of the week, over one that I can pop out any time. I've never opened the battery door on my Nexus, except to turn the thing off from a gnarly overheating freeze. Every time I dropped my HTC Magic, the battery cover would come off, the phone would fly in one direction, and the battery would fly in the other. What does that mean? The phone turns off!

The iPhone 3G was the most durable phone that I ever owned. I could drop it during a phone call (happened once) and picked the thing up a second later to continue talking. You lose a great deal of 1) internal space and 2) structural integrity when you make the battery removable. Having a non-removable battery means that you can skip implementing all the rails and pieces to hold the door on, the frame to hold the battery, etc... gives you a bigger battery overall and more room for other goodies, and/or a smaller phone overall.

Isn't flying apart a pretty good way to dissipate some of the kinetic energy that might otherwise go into components breaking?

Why is it still a moot point? Are you implying that the battery will go bad before the average users expected lifetime of the phone is reached?

Yep.

Their statement implies that with this glass the phone is going to stay usable longer than its existing revision. However Jobs himself said that the battery in the current iPhone is non-removable, because he expects everyone to upgrade before it reaches the end of its life.

Jeez. Would you look at all this downvotes, eh?

Just read what Apple says - "and more scratch resistant than ever" - meaning that this glass is meant to protect against casual scratches, and not against the glass breakage during accidental drops.

The point being that the time it takes to scratch the heck out of 3GS glass is more than a lifetime of its battery. I've been carrying my iPhone in the same pocket with keys, coins and god knows what else for several months now and it still has NO scratches. Hence the original comment - the lack of ultradurable glass is not exactly a problem with existing generation of the iPhone.

iPhone batteries can be replaced, although at $80 it's probably wiser to just buy a new iPhone every two years. http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/service/battery/

A new iPhone 3GS costs about $1000 here in Sweden. So I'd personally rather take the $80 battery, but that's just me.

Even in the US it costs $500+. The trick is that AT&T hides this cost in their 2 year contract to keep you happily locked in for ever.

Well, not if you drop it on the pavement; though how it actually behaves in that situation remains to be seen.

I have to bet that broken glass is the #1 cause of iPhone failure... I've seen it probably 10-15 times in various places.

Shocking! If you drop a complicated electronic device with a glass touch screen, it might break.

The durability of the glass is surely to prevent breakage when you sit on your phone or drop it from a reasonable distance, no?

It is the cause of my 1st gen iphone being on the brink. I'm hoping I can get it to hold out until the end of June.