> Adhesive on the front of the phone, where the screen is, is just fine as far as battery removability is concerned. Are you sure that's a real factor in this comparison?
Adhesive all over the place helps remove volume. So does using annoying connector types, and putting together the parts of the phone in crazy jenga-like assemblies.
The reason why phones are less serviceable today is because they are packed tight. This packed-tight characteristic is harder to manufacture, but much harder to service. The reason why it is there is because the designers of the phone think it is necessary to make a phone that is desirable to the market.
> Well I'm trying to use the example you gave...
OK, so look at total volume vs. screen area, because I think this is really actually the important metric. In less volume, we got basically the same volume of battery and a bigger screen. The metric swung by 20%.
> Citation needed. I've never seen anyone mention sub-millimeter differences in choosing one phone over another.
Phones with replaceable batteries didn't do very well versus their competition, which is a pretty good hint that the ease of replacing batteries was not the primary buying factor. Phone size-- both thinness and total volume-- and screen size-- are unquestionably important buying factors.
> There are bezels on the top and bottom because older phones were less volume efficient than they are today-- something that is enabled by the use of adhesive.
Adhesive on the front of the phone, where the screen is, is just fine as far as battery removability is concerned. Are you sure that's a real factor in this comparison?
> I believe the penalty would be significantly more than .3mm
Well I'm trying to use the example you gave...
> and most people won't.
Citation needed. I've never seen anyone mention sub-millimeter differences in choosing one phone over another.
> Would anyone else just be fine with a thick phone that had a better internal battery?
I think you miss the point of maximizing the customization of the phone. Because phones have to be in a single unit, user customization can only be done through external peripherals (vs. desktop PC where individual components can be customized).
To make the external peripherals as non-invasive as possible, the phone should be as small as possible while still being usable for most use cases. For example, if battery is your priority, get a case that has a built in external battery; many exist. Then you can have your extended battery, while a user who doesn't care about it, can have a smaller phone.
> Why can't smartphone manufacturers understand that a longer battery life is whats lacking in mobile devices?
I think it's quite bold to speak in such factual terms when talking about the "average" consumer or the market. Your opinion does not necessarily apply to everyone, or even the majority of the users. Not that I disagree with you, mind.
It seems to me that these manufacturers are a lot better at knowing what their market wants. I'm saying that because these companies employ a lot of people to figure out what people want to buy. You might be tempted to project your own opinion and common sense onto how the market should behave, but I think these companies are doing a better job at figuring it out. They have to.
I don't think these companies are either stupid or not listening. It really seems to be the case that a large screen increases sales, and longer battery life doesn't. That might seem mystifying to you and me, but that really seems to be the case.
Similarily, you can make phones from plastic, with confusing and slow software on it, sell them for premium price, and own 80% of the Android market in many countries. That is also mystifying to me, but that's what Samsung has accomplished.
EDIT: People are replying to my post as if I said that phones with large screens are a good thing. I didn't.
> Besides the ease of battery replacement, those phones seemed much more durable. Maybe because there was something that gave way on impact?
Metal cases give way, too— permanently. When they give way, they dent, shrinking the space available for the glass screen and, inevitably, cracking it.
Making phone housings out of something other than plastic is an obviously stupid kind of fetishism for certain materials as hallmarks of a vague 'quality' regardless of context.
Idk about the screens. Do we need glass for touchscreens as we know them to work really well? Can they be brighter or something? Or are they largely unnecessary, too?
> 1. Except now you need a new PCB, a new subassembly, new procedures...
Every phone needs new subassemblies and procedures. For the PCB, you end up with an extra one that's tiny true.
> 2. You need a lot of fancy things, just not cell balancing. That “battery health indicator” all iphones have, guess where that’s from.
Sure, okay.
> You can take it from someone who has built several devices with replaceable batteries, or we can just keep debating until I’ve fully explain to you how you actually build one of these.
> The thing is, I don’t want to waste more time on this, you can do your research on your own, or just keep your preconceptions, whatever floats your boat.
Where would I look?
I'm trying to follow your logic. But you mostly keep naming things phones already have. They already have all this engineering work. They already have the battery chip, it just changes location. And that chip is less than $3.
Could you please give me a couple sentence explanation of how you arrived at 20-30% for a phone that's designed from the start to have a removable battery? You keep nitpicking me for not understanding an argument that you never explained!
My understanding goes something like this: Posit a $600 phone of which $50 is the battery pouch. Remove battery pouch and chip from phone, replace with a connector, phone now costs $550? Add plastic shell and $3 chip and connector and tiny PCB onto the battery pouch. For the total price to rise 20%, doing that has to cost more than $100 and leave you with a battery that costs more than $150. How?
And phones didn't get massively cheaper when they stopped letting you remove batteries...
> There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers.
It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
>Define 'most phones' (Not being able to replace the battery is a problem in my world).
In my world too but most smartphones sold these days in fact do not have removable batteries by design. You don't know this?
>Buying a new (crappy, what do you expect for 50 Dollars?) phone because your perfectly working one isn't supported anymore is NOT satisfying and not a solution
That $50 phone is just as good or better than a phone sold 3 or 4 years ago.
>I feel that you're a bit lost. You want to save a bit of money
No dude... I buy a new phone every two years to have a faster one, better features (camera), and better security features (fingerprint reader). Lucky me, I can afford it. My secondary phone is a 2 1/2 year old Nexus 5 which still gets security updates and will for many more years via custom ROMs. Security updates were not the reason I bought a new phone.
Sorry, you don't really seem to be up on current smartphone technology to comment on this intelligently but philosophically I do agree with you.
> “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a lot of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity.
My way of dealing with it is two phones. Besides my smartphone, I still use my more than ten-year-old Nokia when I do not want to take the big smartphone with me. Of course, it only has phone, SMS and a clock. But I usually do not need anything else when I go for a walk or meet up with friends. I just want to be reachable in case there is a problem.
Its old battry still lasts quite a long time, and I have it switched off most of the time anyway. So I can go 7+ days without recharging.
> What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety.
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
> Unsure why phone manufacturers insist on trying to make their phones thinner and more fragile when everyone wraps them in a case of some description.
Because consumers don't actually buy what they say they want.
I'm always seeing people demand more durable screens and longer battery life, and Motorola made the Droid Turbo 2 with a massive 3750 mAh battery and a truly shatter-proof screen. People dropped it from a drone onto concrete from over 500 feet and it survived [0]. It takes more than one smack with a hammer to break the screen. [1]
And yet, nobody bought it, because when it comes to make a purchase, people still want phones that look sleek and modern, which means thin and a back made out of glass, because plastic is ugly, and metal interferes with wireless charging.
Motorola's been producing phones for years that have the features people actually ask for. They made Android phones with physical keyboards up to 2012 [2]. I remember seeing polls about phones with QWERTY keyboards back then and so many people saying they want one, but when it came to actually buy, they'd rather get an iPhone with a screen that shatters if you sneeze.
> And my money is that they'll use whatever volume they free up to mindlessly make the phone thinner.
For some reason this is what the phone manufacturers seem to think that people want and I don't know why. I don't think getting thinner and smaller phones has given me any extra value in the past decade. I would rather have a thicker phone with bigger battery.
> If it was, say $40 more or even $100 and was marketed as being repairable, I bet a lot of people would buy it.
Not all the costs are denominated in dollars.
You want a small phone with little wasted volume and waterproofness, you're using adhesive everywhere. There's not room for O-ring seals and flanges and fittings.
My phone being small makes it more practical.
My phone being waterproof makes it less likely to need repair.
> I'm always blown away out how little cell phone manufacturers seem to listen to customer feedback. I don't care about my phone being paper thin. I'd guess most people don't either.
We can only guess based on what we hear. Cell phone manufacturers have a lot more data than we do and they keep going for thinness, so I have to imagine there's a demand for it.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most consumers prefer battery life to thinness in surveys and polls but actually wind up buying the thinner phone when presented with actual hardware. Thinness is easy to see. If you're comparing phones in a Best Buy, the thinner one might feel more modern and impressive. Battery life is a hard feature to demo in that environment.
In other words, maybe the average person only wants battery life in the abstract, but opts for thinness when making a purchase.
> Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?
Quite the opposite. I want larger/heavier devices. Make my phone a bit thicker and heavier and sturdier, please. I feel the same about a laptop. I recently got a new laptop, and the flimsiness of high-end machines was a turnoff. The salesman kept saying "but it's only X lbs, so much lighter" as though that was a selling point. But I want strong hinges, large replaceable batteries, etc. I could care less about 3 vs 7 lbs.
> even with IP68, there are tons of replaceable-battery-operated waterproof devices out there.
Buyers would also rather keep the solid slab with no hatch form factor, than see the phone be 2mm thicker I assume. A lot of other devices don't have a size budget that is as extreme as a modern smartphone.
Put the other way: a slightly bigger phone (because of some separating compartment, gaskets, battery in a plastic cartridge and so on) could instead have been a solid slab with a slightly larger battery, so several hours extra battery time or higher performance at the same battery time.
> There are bezels on the top and bottom because the S4 came out in 2013, not because of the waterproofing method.
There are bezels on the top and bottom because older phones were less volume efficient than they are today-- something that is enabled by the use of adhesive.
> IP67 is enough for me, and I will happily trade .3mm of thickness for a removable battery.
OK, but, I believe the penalty would be significantly more than .3mm, and most people won't.
Ok... but most people don't. So you aren't going to get that. You can't expect phone development projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars to cater to your particular views. And guess what more: people who buy a device just once aren't going to be anyone's priority for anything.
> And, actually, it's possible to have both. I remember there were water-resistant Sony phones that had user-replaceable batteries.
Adhesive all over the place helps remove volume. So does using annoying connector types, and putting together the parts of the phone in crazy jenga-like assemblies.
The reason why phones are less serviceable today is because they are packed tight. This packed-tight characteristic is harder to manufacture, but much harder to service. The reason why it is there is because the designers of the phone think it is necessary to make a phone that is desirable to the market.
> Well I'm trying to use the example you gave...
OK, so look at total volume vs. screen area, because I think this is really actually the important metric. In less volume, we got basically the same volume of battery and a bigger screen. The metric swung by 20%.
> Citation needed. I've never seen anyone mention sub-millimeter differences in choosing one phone over another.
Phones with replaceable batteries didn't do very well versus their competition, which is a pretty good hint that the ease of replacing batteries was not the primary buying factor. Phone size-- both thinness and total volume-- and screen size-- are unquestionably important buying factors.
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