You can still get those batteries replaced. It's just a lot more work.

There are many You-tube videos showing step by step. If you're slightly handy with small screws it's not hard. I've replaced my Samsung battery twice over the years. Look into it before you cast doubt and lose hope.

I might go to a shop, but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video for something manufacturers themsleves let you do in 5 seconds.

However, that does not leave me with workable alternatives. I respect what Fairphone is trying to do, but €500 for a replaceable battery phone with internals several years old isn't the right choice for me.

>>but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video

But.....why? It's hardly any effort. Saying "I won't fiddle around with a screwdriver" is a stance as respectable as someone saying they are proud of not being able to do maths or know basic geography facts.

It depends on the phone. Some are constructed with glue as well as screws, or have plastic tabs that become brittle and can easily break when servicing the phone.

That was likely true of models from the mid-2010s, but based on what I've seen of Hugh Jeffrey's work, most modern, high-end smartphones are held together with glue and require the disconnection of multiple fragile ribbon cables to replace the battery. It's a daunting task even for someone with experience working on computer components.

The Samsung XCover6 Pro has an easily replaceable battery (and water resistance and physical buttons and dedication to 5 years of patching). In fact, I think it uses the same battery as the XCover from a couple of years ago. I just ordered mine yesterday actually. Kinda excited.

I'd buy one if it wasn't as slow and unperformant as all the reviews say it is. I want a Galaxy S10e in that package.

Yeah, it's a mid-range phone, not a top-end one. But, eh, $600. And frankly, for what I'm doing, a mid-range phone is quite adequate. It has for example, 3x the memory and 2x the processing power of the temporary phone I'm using right now which is functional-but-annoying.

sadly it does not have support for /e/, graphene or similar.

My 3 last phones have been samsung, and after using /e/ I have no intent of getting an original samsung software again

I have fond memories of rooting early Android devices, and having to constantly rip the battery out when the phone would inevitably lock up.

I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.

I've never ever ran into a situation where holding the power button for ~15 seconds didn't reset the phone. This stuff runs at a _way_ lower level than the software you can mess with.

Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.

I recently managed to "hard-brick" my Motorola one 5g ace after updating magisk, getting stuck in a bootloop, and naively deciding to attempt to boot from the B slot instead. On qualcomm-based devices you can get into EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode where you have nothing that is actually bootable on the device, and the phone will remain entirely unresponsive save for appearing as a serial device when plugged in over USB. You then need to "talk" to the phone with the appropriate protocol (Sahara or Firehose depending on the age of the device) and you can gradually work towards recovery. In my case I was able to manually reconstruct a valid bootloader.img for my particular software version, re-flash it, and get back into a "soft-brick" state from there.

However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering.

Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.

Funny, I've gotten close to doing the exact same thing, though I realized my mistake before ruining it completely. Reset sequence worked the whole time (I think it would even in EDL mode, though you wouldn't _see_ anything).

You can definitely mess it up really bad, but I don't know if you can get to a point where there's no reset path. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

I have seen newer 1+ phones lock up and it fail to respond to the reset sequence. After receiving a call the modem crashes and it reboots. No other input can reset the device.

Interesting. Never heard of this.

It's strange to me how 'newer' phones (referencing my iphone 5s) seem to have software control battery life? I got the battery replaced multiple times on an iphone and none of them really provided a sustained increase in the battery life of the device.

I've replaced my iPhone SE (2016)'s battery three times since I originally bought it.

Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day.

You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?

planned obsolescence

As long as you have a phone that's reasonably well designed, it's usually not too much trouble to replace the internal battery every 2-3 years.

I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap.

At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!

I believe the research would suggest 80% doesn't really make an especially good target. Its mostly a linear relationship between state of charge and speed of battery aging, other than a step change around 50-70% depending on the chemistry.

source (one of many): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf

I keep my EV charged to just 50% most days for this reason, get below that step change.

Interesting, just a note to someone reading that paper: I'm not sure what methodology they used (did they keep the cell SoC in storage?), but storing depleted cells can severely degrade them due to self-discharge (that's why the recommended storage SoC is usually 40%).

I had to bite my tongue seeing a young woman idly hoy one of those extremely wasteful ecigs in the bin on my way home earlier. I wa mentally working all the bits of complexity going to landfill.

Still, perhaps I should buy ex-landfill sites on the cheap, so my descendants can mine them.

Al Dente didn‘t really work for me. I used it constantly for 1.5-2 years (capped at 60-80) and my battery still went to 88% of design capacity. My iPhone‘s battery on the other hand has been tortured for three years (always charging 100%, fast charging, getting very hot in the sun) and is still at 85%.

I feel like the batteries nowadays are just made to last 2-3 years to get to 85-80% capacity no matter how you treat them

> I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%

They have a "smart charging" setting which is poorly defined. It says it limits charging to 80% sometimes using AI. I think the idea is it charges to 100% overnight, and 80% the rest of the time.

But i agree, it would be nice if it had a selector switch. Some laptops have a "aim for 60%, 80% or 100% battery charge" option.

The AI tries to predict when you’re going to be leaving it on the charger for a while (like going to bed), and limits the charging to 80% until it predicts you’ll likely need it, then charges it the rest of the way.

They do the same thing for Macs, but it’s way, way too conservative IMO. My M1 MBP sits on my desk on a dock with a charger pretty much all week, and it eventually figures out that it should just keep it at 80%. Until a brief period where I use it on battery, draining maybe down to 70%. When I put it back on the dock, it charges back to 100% and stays there for the next 2 days.

I would be happy with a “Don’t bother trying to learn, just cap it at 80%, I’ll tell you when I change my mind” setting.

Thank you.

I too agree that I would prefer to have a manual/scheduled charge setting system.

I just got the batteries replaced in my iPhone X for about $45, and I was without the phone for less than an hour. I am amazed, and very happy not having to shell out $1000 for a new phone that would just have been a marginal upgrade to my current one.

You can get a gizmo called a Chargie that lets your phone control charge rate and max charge% over Bluetooth to this little interposer dongle that sits between the charger and phone. Getting enough to equip all my usual charge points would exceed the cost of a replacement battery, but I guess if they last for more than one phone it's possibly worthwhile.

If you are on Android and have root, you can install ACC (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/mattecarra.accapp/). It lets you customise the charging profile of your phone as well as see battery statistics, but out of the box it

1. Caps charging to 80%

2. Pauses charging if it gets too hot, until it's below 40°C

If you sporadically need full capacity (travelling, etc), just hit the "charge once to 100%" button and you're good to go.

You can get a replacement battery pretty easy online. I'm sure somewhere would be willing to do the replacement. It isn't impossible, just hard without the right tools

I opened my Samsung A40 two days ago and replaced a camera that didn't autofocus anymore. 20 Euros with shipping. The battery can be replaced too. Actually I had to disconnect it to remove the upper motherboard and access the camera. It seems a pretty serviceable phone. You should check YouTube for tear down videos about your model.

No Android 12 (released October 4, 2021) or 13 for the Galaxy A40 phone has been released by Samsung :c

OS updates make or break devices long term.

I'm still getting system upgrades. Actually I wish they didn't upgrade to Android 10 because it made Syncthing much less useful as it can't access all the files anymore (but file managers can, even open source ones, so maybe it's a problem with Syncthing itself.)

Considering that I've got the phone in June 2019, I paid less than 100 Euro per year. If I had to buy a new phone to have Android 12 (and I don't understand why I should - I'd be fine with Android 8 or even 4 if I'd get security patches), 100 Euro per year is acceptable. The big problem with buying a new phone is that I'm not buying from Apple and I'm not going to find an Android one as small as the A40, which is already too big IMHO. I wish it was 3/4 or one inch shorter (2 or 2.5 cm.)

I'm in the exact same position. Only now that my 5-inch 16:9 from 2016 completely died (and I can't get replacement batteries anywhere) did I begrudgingly buy a Pixel 4a.

Palm Pilot lacked constant internet connectivity, and that's its real killer "feature" as it relates to longevity. It means you never have to update the OS, so the progressively more shoddy programming over time can go bloat someone else's device to death. "Non-replaceable" battery, as others have mentioned, is just non technical quitter talk in almost all cases.

> I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries.

This is one of the worst design trends (perhaps the worst) of modern-day devices.