this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Swapable batteries were common on cell phones in the 80's and 90's except no fancy machine was needed.
Some fairly recent phones even had docks that would charge your phone and a swappable battery at the same time
That's whole century.
News from 2011 about the HTC Thunderbolt dock.
You mean a decade. A century is 100 years.
I mean /s
…..fuck.
and... get this: while you were swapping your battery you could drop in a swappable expansion on storage. Utter madness.
Many phones let you upgrade storage without opening it. Madness, I know.
I was using an LG G5 that had swappable batteries 3 years ago.
IKR.
Why did we start building batteries into phones?
Because we kept buying thinner and lighter phones, and gluing the battery in makes thinner and lighter phones with better battery life possible. As a convenient side effect glue creates a nice watertight seal that can make devices more water resistant.
Hrm maybe.
I mean a wristwatch can be 200m water resistant and still be user servicable. A simple rubber gasket, some silicone grease and some screws.
I imagine it's a hell of a lot cheaper/simpler/more reliable in manufacturing to use the adhesive over screws, gaskets, and grease. It reduces both the BOM and the number of processes required to ship a unit, and probably fails less often, which means fewer RMAs. Plus it just plain takes up less space, which leaves more room for the battery.
I don't like it, my favorite phone I've ever had was a Galaxy Nexus with a zerolemon battery that was bigger than the phone itself, but I can see why gluing everything together would be an attractive solution for the engineers who design these things.
So they can sell you a new phone instead of a replacement battery.
90's, definitely.
Which 80's models mobiles are you thinking of, exactly?
The Motorola DynaTAC. They had a big Ni-Cd battery that is also the back of the case. You would need often need two batteries to get through a whole day, so they were made to be easily swapped.