Removable Smartphone Batteries

This will likely make phones bigger and/or available power (mAh) worse as the battery will need more material surrounding it to make it replaceable. Good intentions but makes the customer worse off IMO

I took apart my old smartphone at one point. It was old enough that the battery was attached with screws and connected to the board with a cable and a connector.It's not bigger than existing phones. It doesn't weigh more, it's not thicker. The weight of a battery connector and a couple of screws is what, a couple of grams, if that?"We needed to make it thinner" is just an excuse.

For a few reasons:1. There is an industry drive to make phones thinner, and one way to do that is to minimize the casing that a battery requires.2. Waterproofing is a desirable feature, which is much harder to do when you have an accessible battery, especially in conjunction with 1.3. Very few customers ever replace their battery.4. Phones held together with adhesive and made from glass/metal feel and look better than plastic that snaps together. When marketing a premium product

It’s not a guess. Phones with removable batteries are thicker than “unibody” phones. Sorry but that’s kind of obvious.If you need a reference: https://www.cnet.com/news/its-time-to-kiss-that-removable-sm...

If they'd just abandon the quest for thinness and put decently-large removable batteries in their phones, it would make crap like this unnessary.

The current designs allow for fitting more battery into a smaller space because the available space can be non-contiguous and can contain odd angles while a replaceable battery comes in whatever shape you want as long as the shape is rectangular. By not having accessible batteries the vendor can seal the phone much better and increase its water-resistance. Your older phones were larger, heavier, not water-resistant, and had one more set of user-accessible failure points.

Hope they use the extra space to add more battery and not for making the phone thinner.

The people suggesting to buy a case are probably the same people defending the audio jack removal. Imagine how much more battery they could fit in if the phone was a bit thicker.

If 1mm worth of battery capacity is important, why do Apple and others keep making phones progressively thinner?

I dunno, this seems like a sane thing to want AND think that this is what your users might want.And yet repetitively we dont get those products.Like this trend with protruding cameras out of phone's body. Just make the body that bit thicker and slap bigger battery on it.And you can boast in ads that it last 2 days instead 5hrs.Maybe we are wrong? Or there is some kind of nonobvious business logic behind it.