I found the same detection system in a portable CD player I got in 1999. Rechargeable cells wouldn’t be recognized as such.

I should check, but I think the brand name matches…

How low can they go? What a nasty deceitful trick. I would somehow feel cheated if I found out that’s what they were doing. It adds absolutely no feature to the device and is only a money grab attempt.

ftf!

How sleazy.

I can confirm the symptoms for my Philips SHD8900. I bought replacement rechargeable batteries for when I am using the headphones for a very long time. I have noticed that, despite having 1000 mAh each (expensive Varta stuff), the replacements last about 30 minutes, while the original rechargeable batteries last for several hours. This

Time to go shorting…

@PaoloC : My Philips portable CD player got such a nasty thing (put a wire at this time to get it work) !

I was thinking it was a support issue, meaning people support. That way they can say “Hey look, you need to use our batteries”. I know it sounds sleazy but it can be infuriating trying to support somebody when they are using inferior parts in your product. Almost invariably they blame your product instead of the cheap part they put in it.

The detection circuit, though, counters that argument. If it was just the label, than that would suffice, but I don’t understand why the diode is there.

I find it kind of disappointing because I have always enjoyed all of my Phillips devices. I hope this isn’t just a sham and there is some real reason behind it.

infuriating? no, just don’t buy the headphones.

@Smithy:

They don’t print “works only with our batteries” right on the box, do they?

@Matt

Agree… If people are this stupid (I hope not), they deserve the joy of exploding batteries close to their head…

Not surprising at all coming from Philips.

They are very good at dirty marketing.

i agree with george, the 6th post. it looks like an easy way of preventing alkaline batteries from getting charged and potentially blowing up.

yes it looks like a sleazy move but think about it from their POV. if there’s a chance the end user can cause catastrophic failure by using other kinds of batteries, prevent that failure state.

be glad that the fix is simple enough that a clever person can figure it out and not put themselves in danger of wrecking their hardware

@Frank

Technology messes with the natural order of things.
Those lucky enough to be endowed with relatively superior minds develop technology that allows those with relatively inferior bodies to survive and procreate (and relatively inferior minds to survive).
I’m not sure it’s always a good thing for the long-term survival of a species to be artificially inflated by technology- it has to crash at some point.

And if people really can’t be bothered enough to learn at least a little bit about the technology they’re using (especially when it pertains to their safety- and when using batteries it always does), then they probably shouldn’t be using the technology in the first place.

It’s not so much a matter of compassion as a matter of whether a small group of people should have to watch out for everybody else. I don’t expect anyone else to watch out for me.

I had a Norelco electric razor with built-in rechargible batteries like this; I guessed they were NiMH, but they had this weird 3rd connection. The stock bats were not holding a charge any more, so I opened it up, and soldered-in a new set of COTS NiMH batteries with the outer foil wrapper peeled off with an x-acto knife in a small area, big enough to solder the third lead in.

I figured – worst thing that could happen: I’d have to buy a new razor anyway.

It worked though. :)

Next set I replaced in there two years later did not, though.

@Frank

Well it’s not like I’m exaggerating or anything like that, no no no….

Anyway, Agree with Matt, If you cannot use a battery please go away from wireless headsets… -.-’

It seems to primarily be a safety feature. I guess normal battery chargers don’t enforce this because the batteries aren’t next to your head while being charged, so the danger is much less.

Seems reasonable enough tbh. If they were doing it for profit then they’d have stuck a chip in them like they do with ink cartridges.

If there IS a diode in/on the battery – it’s very likely being used as a temperature sensor. NiMh batteries can be charged more efficiently/safely/faster if you can carefully monitor the cell temperature.

This is not some dastardly plot to force everyone to use Philips batteries. It was just a cost-saving decision, but not a particularly bad one…
If a manufacturer intends a device to use standard-sized batteries, it must accomodate all the variability therein. Most manufacturers are happy to accommodate your rechargables, as long as you handle the charging.

But in order to allow in-device charging, you’ve got to prevent accidental charging of Alkalines. Most external chargers have temp sensors and regulating circuits that disallow this – but they’re big and expensive. Bottom line is, two tiny contacts is way smaller and cheaper than the alternative.

And in response to those draconian “anyone who recharges Alkalines deserves what they get” arguments: When your cell phone batteries run low, do you open it up and check that the battery is rechargable? No, you just plug it in! You assume it is rechargable, because it has a charging port.

Now, I’d much rather my devices all support in-device charging. But until there’s a standard developed, it aint happening. So I salute Philips. Their solution is very simple, cheap as-free, and fool-proof. I predict such a standard will eventually be adopted by all the other battery makers.

Thats brilliant. Evil but brilliant.

About on the same level as Dell with their chipped power supplies which only charge one model and nothing else, thereby ensuring you buy their expensive charger rather than the £19.95 generic replacement.

Oh, and they also have a “nice” habit of using special code on the memory chips inside their LCD panels which means you can’t replace a panel with anything else without it malfunctioning.
Learned this the hard way, turns out that you can swap the panel to a different laptop but not the other way around.

@Leif

In regard to your statement about cell phone batteries, all [useful] cell phones nowadays have rechargeable Li-Ion batteries. Some may have Ni-*, but they all have integrated charge controllers.

I fully endorse the BadWolf’s idea of a list of disreputable companies and products with such artificial limitations (and, if possible, also the workarounds).

Another useful list could be which company uses which brand of capacitors in which product line; e.g. like Acer using C(r)apXon capacitors or Benq using Elite brand (which is all but elite) in at least some of their monitors.

Some kind of machine-readable identification could be useful there, to facilitate Greasemonkey-like script inclusions on eshop pages. Real-life linkage via e.g. UPC/EAN product codes would also be nice.

I have the same Headphones and I just removed the plastic label of my recherchabel Battery of the same type and it works just fine.

As already pointed it is in fact a nice engenering trick to allows both normal battery and rechargeable battery to be use on the headset.
You can put any rechargeable battery if you remove the plastic isolation near the minus pole.

I sent a mail to philips telling that this is a shame and that I won’t buy product from them anymore. Feel free to do so also.

It’s a lock-in feature.

I have a Phillips table charger built in the transmitter unit of a pair of headphones that don’t have a DC jack, and the table unit has the extra connector as well, preventing it from recharging other batteries.

No other battery charger has that. It isn’t a safety feature for the dumb, it’s just “buy our batteries”.

I’ve owned a cheap off-brand portable MP3 CD player with the same feature. While it may be exploited to sell quasi-proprietary batteries, I suspect the “safe” bare-ended rechargeable is some form of lesser-known industry standard and not proprietary to Philips. Here’s another vendor offering similar special batteries for their portable device:

http://www.amigofm.com/amigo/com/AmigoFM/Solutions/Accessories/PowerOptions/index

Note that, like the headphones, the AmigoFM device is designed to be worn on the user’s person, with conceivable safety implications.

It might be interesting for HaD readers to investigate all their portable electronic devices which support recharging standard form factors. The feature may be more widespread than we realize.

And so another company enters the blacklist.

This sort of shit just makes my blood boil.

I dont think we can call it proprietary, because this case inst about greed, think what other options does they have:
1) add complicated circuit detecting battery internal resistance to distinguish between rechargeable and non rechargeable battery. so it would be major cost increase.
2) abandon non-rechargeable batteries, put many warning labels and wait for lawsuits anyways

It *is* the same thing as the camera battery-ID chip, except it’s carried onboard the phones and is only ‘enabled’ by connecting the correct battery.

that’s just crazy

@Spork

>They could care less if you know about it

wow look at all the drone haters out there… keep grazing on all the grass the farmer will be out with more grain soon.

Has anyone even read the comments?? Before you boycott Phillips know that there is nothing proprietary about this, it is a SAFETY feature, and one commenter even suggests that the manual talks about how to get around it with off brand rechargables…

This article was written to incite this kind of rage, however it is very mis-leading… The feature allows you to use off shelf batteries, boycotting should be reserved for the manufacturers that use proprietary batteries and make their products consumable by sheeple who trash dead products rather then replace the batteries.

just spit-ballin here. but could you not just scrape the paint shell off of a few regular AAA bat’s to short the circuit out? just a thought..

I’ve seen that on a Philips mobile phone like 10 years ago, anyway I liked to be able to use standard AA cells when I wasn’t able to charge the phone.
So It’s the philips way!

2x of the 1.2v batteries is 2.4v, 2x of the 1.5v batteries is 3v, a .6v difference. I just assume this is to allow standard 1.5 batteries to be used, and still supply 2.4v

I came across something like this at my part time job. We got a bunch of second-hand two way FRS/GMRS radios in and the boss wanted me to refurb them for employee use, as we work in a large warehouse and the phone paging system is inadequate for relaying info.

A few of the radios were made by Midland and had a battery pack that was just four AAA NiMHs bridged and in a heat shrink package. Just for kicks I put four individual AAA NiMHs in and plugged in the charger. No dice. So I looked closer at the battery pack and the radio’s compartment and I noticed there was a bare patch on the pack that corresponded to a connector on the radio. I shaved some of the plastic off of the relevant loose battery, reinstalled them and it began charging normally.

After prepping all of my loose NiMHs with a bare patch in the right spot, I can now substitute high capacity battery sets for the original packs and get nearly a week between charges, as opposed to daily recharging with the original low capacity packs.

Thanks to this site, I was able to use my 3dr party batteries in my headphones, I just cut out the plastic from the end of the batteries and they now work like a charm.