Built-in batteries put a timebomb inside devices, with especially the calendar aging feature of Li-ion chemistries setting a hard limit on when you’ll have to toss the device or figure out a way to replace the battery somehow. Here the EU’s Battery Regulation policy with the 2027 implementation of the user-serviceable battery requirement provided a lot of hope. Now six new categories of exemptions are diminishing what could have been a bonanza of easy repairability.
Most notable here are smartwatches, fitness trackers, wireless earbuds and other so-called ‘wet devices’, which as GSMArena also notes is an area where having a user-replaceable battery might affect features like being water-resistant. Something which is also relevant for e.g. outdoor wireless speakers. There’s also a new exemption for smartphones, where if its battery retains at least 83% of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles, battery replacement has to be only replaceable by professionals. Which is probably code for ‘glue, hotplates and prying tools’.
Considering just how daft of an idea built-in batteries are, this is somewhat disappointing to see. While it’s understandable that ‘wet devices’ get such broad exemptions, it should be noted here that advanced technologies like gaskets are neither complicated nor expensive. You can even hand the average user a tube of RTV silicone and let them go to town on a part in the happy knowledge that there’s never such a thing as ‘too much’ RTV silicone.
It is likely that there was some pressure from the industry on the EU to not change too much, but at the very least us happy few in the EU will be getting a new Nintendo Switch 2 with easily replaced battery in both the main unit and its controllers. For the average rechargeable device you keep kicking around the house this should also still apply as long as its manufacturer cannot squeeze it into one of these exemption categories.
The Right to Repair battles shall continue.
Most mobiole phones and tablets will retain around 85% battery capacity after 2 years…more than 500 charge cycles for most people.
So for us this means: no changes being implemented at all…except maybe for cheap toys. Go figure…the envelopes that passed underneath the tables must have been sizeable.
The envelope WAS the table.
Yeah, my phone is 4.5 years old. According to its own battery monitor I’ve charged it 294 times totaling 9500% of its rated capacity, so 95 total “charge cycles”. It still estimates 94% of its original rated capacity.
I’m sure it will fall off the cliff at some point, maybe next week, maybe in 4 more years, but it makes the “85% in 2 years” look like a pending warranty claim.
That said, my previous two phones had to be retired due to spicy pillows, even though I did replace the battery in one myself — and that cheap replacement battery lasted only a year before going fat.
Your phone lasts 16 days between charges? Do you leave it plugged in for days on end or is your phone Nokia 6210?
Not 16 days: 4.5 years/294 charges is 5.6 days. It’s a Motorola.
It’s a phone. It has very few apps. I don’t play games on it. I don’t do facebook or instagram or x/twit/mast/disc/etc. I don’t doomscroll on it. I don’t watch movies or listen to audiobooks on it. I take the occasional photo but don’t shoot movies. I don’t use it for navigation. I don’t receive calls on it — it doesn’t even ring, voice calls go straight to voicemail.
It’s a device for MY convenience, not anybody else’s, and my life doesn’t revolve around a little black slab.
It’s a phone. Messages and outgoing calls, that’s about it.
I wish my old Nokia still worked. I got two weeks per charge out of that.
Also have to ask according to whom, and what penalties will be issued when the phone manufacturer fails to actually provide a 500 charge cycle good enough battery…
If the brand selling the device can just claim on the paper work it does (and perhaps fiddle the firmware so when the battery is failing it still reports healthier etc) then unless there are downsides and monitoring for it it is a completely meaningless rule that nobody actually has to follow.
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/24/non-replaceable-battery-not-if-this-proposed-eu-law-passes/
It was known from the very beginning that this regulation would be gimped by industry demands.
Yes, these “6 new exemption” gut the whole thing.
Sad to see progress stifled by lobbyist. Still cost a lot of money, that consumers will pay, to change nothing.
Nah. As a user of both waterproof sports headphones and a(n expensive) smart watch, I would much rather have proper, functional waterproofing than a crappy seal for a user serviceable battery.
You absolutely can have both functional waterproofing and a removable cover to get in a service the device though, I’d even suggest a real gasket is more likely to seal properly as the tiniest air bubble in the glue application creates a pathway for water ingress, and a little bit of flexing is much more likely to make the glue fail than a gasket put together correctly. The only reason everything is glued is it is cheaper.
About the only place its really really tricky is in ear sized devices – volume of those has to be so so small to be useable by folks with smaller ears, so it becomes glue it together is just about the only sane option. But a watch is trivial, especially the touch screen watch with very few if any physical buttons poking holes in the outer casing.
As many mobile phones are advertised as “waterproof” (even if they don’t necessarily succeed at that very well) doesn’t that allow the manufacturers to claim they are “wet” devices?
Prime example of them not being waterproof, take a phone to a hot country and then take it into the water. The cooling of the phone sucks water straight in.
Waterproofing only works if there is not a large temperature differential.
“there was some pressure from the industry on the EU”
The top EU politicians seem to be exposed to a lot of “pressure” from, let’s say, third parties. Especially ones that aren’t afraid to lose their voters’ trust because they haven’t actually been elected by voters but by, let’s say, third parties.
Their voters? Elected? I think you misunderstand what the EU is. You don’t vote for people that are in the EU. If there are elections and you even bother to go out and vote, you vote for a political party. But that party isn’t in the EU. Say you got national party A, B, C and D that you can vote for. Party A and B then say, we hand off our votes to party F that is not controlled by us, but is represented in the EU. Party F is then hopefully going to do a few things that we want, if we are lucky. Party C and D then say, well that’s great, we are going to hand off our votes to party G and hope they might do some stuff we want them to do. There might be exceptions to this, but I haven’t seen one yet.
So in this case, say you vote for party A who only wants one thing, and that is user replaceable batteries in all new mobile phones. Party A has to work with party B that doesn’t really care and they hand it off to party F to represent A and B and F goes out and votes to ban user replaceable batteries. So no, they don’t have to worry one bit about voters trust because it’s not a democracy.
Note: Bob is talking complete rubbish.
Nobody really knows how the EU works, because it’s such a quagmire of different levels of bureaucracy that it’s impossible to say who’s in charge.
I tried to look up who makes the EU regulations, on what authority, and I ended up three levels down the rabbit hole and still didn’t find anyone who was actually voted into their job as representative of any people. They’re all nominated and selected by another body of bureaucrats.
That’s literally how the EU works. Either go look up how it works or don’t, but saying I’m talking rubbish is not nice especially when you don’t know how it works.
Typical of the EU to advertise legal rules as consumer friendly and then soften them so much that it only helps the richest companies to shut off the competition.
Why 83% ? Why not a round value like 80 or 90% ? Probably because 83% is what Apple promises for the iPhone.
Well… on the bright side, at least THIS particular bit of the typical EU idiocy will not affect me, this time… cause you know, we have EU to thank for the 287358726348726347523785682365876234897982346876987125347862398576239845 cookie notices you get every time you visit a god damn website, now.
oh, just get the right plugin for your browser.
Nah. The blame for that lies with the companies who want to track every move you make on the internet. If they weren’t tracking the shit out of you, then they wouldn’t have to pop-up that warning.
If you want to bitch about something, bitch about the companies selling your data instead of bitching about the EU trying to protect your privacy.
Why don’t write to the people who operate the websites that piss you off. Tell ’em you are tired of their bullshit and that they should stop tracking you.
Blame the client software you’re using to access website for not being able to hide unwanted content ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Excluding images and fonts, with my custom set of filters it only takes 6 requests and 370 kB of data (uncompressed) to load HaD main page compared to 28 requests and 1.6 MB (uncompressed) on a regular browser. Internet can still be quick, snappy and pleasant to use but you need some technical knowledge to be able to show the finger to all the greedy corporations.
It’s a tough balance.
I don’t respect the sites that have tons of popups or click-bait content that is mostly advertising.
But I also appreciate sites with good content and don’t want them to go broke. And I would prefer some REASONABLE level of ads over having to pay a whole bunch of subscription fees.
I also don’t want companies (or governments) having all my detailed personal information. But I do appreciate that they have some idea what sort of ads to show me. Surely most people don’t get all the techie tool and parts ads like I do! And I really don’t miss the days when “punch the monkey”, ED pills and feminine products dominated the browser.
So what exactly are you so excited about blocking on HaD???
Different person, but I block:
The HaD logo on top with the huge text, the bar below it, the social links, the entire right side with the search stuff etc from top to bottom, the previous/next article buttons and everything below the ‘leave a reply’. Just compared my browser to an incognito page.
All ad money comes from consumers buying goods from companies that advertise. When people are using services paid for through ads, everyone is paying, including you. The cost of having services this way is far greater than directly subscribing to them, because some intermediate broker like Google keeps most of the money to themselves.
The only reason it seems “cheap” is because the cost is spread over so many people, who mostly have nothing to do with the case because most people don’t use most online services. It’s like a private tax. Any time you use ad-funded services instead of paying directly, you’re exploiting other people.
The average US, EU, Canada, UK, etc. citizen is paying about $16 per month to Google alone through the cost of online advertising paid by most businesses.
Meanwhile, the industry reported cost of one click (CPC) of an ad is approximately $5 which means that online advertising is stupendously inefficient at generating sales.
There’s basically no “reasonable level of ads” to support online content, because online ads essentially don’t work and most of the money goes towards the broker, not the service being sponsored.
No. You don’t get to blame the EU for the bad behavior of corporations.
You realize that those cookie notices are SPECIFICALLY crafted to be maliciously compliant, to manipulate you into opposing the rule that exists to protect you from those companies right?
Be mad at the people doing the thing you dislike, not the people trying to protect you from the bad parties.
Bureaucracy that is designed to be easily abused is one half of the problem. Who do you think designed this system?
Tell that to the Challenger
An exception that proves the rule. When designed, installed and used according to spec, gaskets work fine. That failure was because a gasket was used in conditions way out of spec. And the users even were told so, but ignored it. And they also clearly didn’t read the owner’s manual.
Have watches been classed historically as the battery not being user replaceable?
Have I been breaking the rules since I was 10years old?
Probably, in all sorts of ways…
User replacing the battery in a watch probably voids warranty, and almost definitely voids promises of water resistance. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but caveat hackitor.
You can change a watch battery while keeping the water resistance, you just have to be careful. Clean the old grease and dirt off the case and o-ring, then apply fresh grease. Make sure the o-ring is in the correct place when you put it back together.
This is specifically for so called wearables. This is not traditional timekeeping watches, instead it means “smart” devices like apple watch.
There are many offerings with user replaceable batteries, most of them in the lower price segments. If people would make their buying decisions based on common sense instead of vanity, this would be a non-issue.
That is the issue. I can either buy a quick phone with a decent camera, unlockable bootloader and 7 years of software updates where i have to heat and pry the battery after 4 years, or a phone with easily replaceable battery and headphone jack that has locked bootloader and if lucky gets this years android in 2 years.
they can still upload kill code in an update.
I just don’t get it. I’m pretty sure that if a phone would exist where you could swap the battery like you do on a cordless drill there would be no need for wireless charging, fast charging, whatever. user would simply swap their empty battery for the full one every morning and when a battery starts to die, order a new one and toss the bad one(s). That this make the phone 2mm thicker, who cares, they are already to thin to handle and the size issue is getting ridiculous anyway, since the screens are getting larger and larger.
Sure a nice thin phone looks cool in the adds, but it doesn’t make any sense if you need to stick a wireless charging batterypack on it (held in place by heavy circular magnets).
I’m telling you, changing batterypacks on phones, like changing batterypacks on powertools is the way to go. At least in my universe…
This exists. Get a Fairphone.
That is not exactly a quick swap system either
on a related note, i understand that there is a culture of removeable batteries on some models of electric cars in China, which is a great idea assuming a 500 kg battery can be designed in a way that a single human (perhaps with a specialized dolly) could do the replacing. then a user could not only swap batteries instead of charging, but they could also decide to use smaller, lighter batteries when tooling around town, thereby not wasting energy hauling around battery capacity they do not intend to use.
No need for a human to be involved. The car automatically parks itself in the battery replacement facility, and automated systems swap the battery for you in a couple of minutes, and you drive off. You don’t even get out of the car.
So, basically how phones used to be, before they went the “integrated battery” route to make phones thinner and water resistant.
Question: What’s the safe shelf life of a cell phone battery? I have a decade or two of old phones on the shelf (I sometimes have trouble convincing myself to discard working devices, which I suspect many here can empathize with); at what point do I need to strip out the batteries or discard them appropriately for safety?
(I know there was discussion here on HaD of replacing the pouch batteries with something that looked enough like a full battery to satisfy the charger circuit, so the phone could be safely run entirely from USB power, but I have lost my pointer to that; if someone could remind me of what we concluded would do the job, I’d appreciate it.)
from my own devices’ experience, the shelf life is, for li-ion at least, enough, possibly more than the current lifetime of the technology. I think if it has not become pillow-shaped, its alright.
Your experience is atypical.
Even when kept at stable temperature, with 40-50% charge, a lithium battery from 10 years ago is essentially e-waste.
Safe? Maybe. If the conditions are very carefully controlled. And if we are talking about a large sample size.
Statistically those old batteries WILL eventually be dangerous.
I’m actually interested to see when it becomes a major problem big enough to be news and/or effect homeowners insurance. There have got to be dozens of devices in the average person’s home that are slowly decomposing in the back of closets, drawers, basements, etc.
How long until they all start to age-out and we see a string of failures big enough to make the news cycle?
“There’s also a new exemption for smartphones, where if its battery retains at least 83% of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles, battery replacement has to be only replaceable by professionals.”
Source?
Cannot find that detail in the legal texts.
“manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives may provide the battery or batteries referred to in point (i)(a) only to professional repairers if manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives ensure that the following requirements are met: […] after 500 full charge cycles the battery has, in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;”
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02023R1670-20250620
took some time to find that, it was definitely not sourced by the linked articles.
Thank you. I wasn’t expecting this to be already in effect for a year, so I didn’t search older regulations.
Marketing… Our new sealed smartphones will keep on working after you accidentally drop it in the toilet
Me… No thanks. You can stick that thing up to your face after it’s been in the toilet. I’ll just be careful with mine.
Marketing… but what if you forget it’s in your pocket and jump in the pool?
Me… Then I will learn an expensive lesson and never do it again. Now how do I change this damn battery?
I have actually jumped in the pool with phone in pocket and was saved by waterproofing. But I’m sure that could be implemented with a gasket instead of this glue crap.
It’s not a zero-internal-volume option; but, if the battery is explicitly intended to be replaceable, you can also adjust the seal locations to compensate.
It’s fairly simple and reliable to move electricity through a barrier that is an excellent moisture seal(potentially expensive if you want a lot of data lines; but a handful of contacts isn’t bad) and any fixes to the lots-of-layers PCB and teeny SMT parts are going to be a professional-level job; so you can go with a life-of-product glue hassle to protect the mainboard from moisture while leaving the battery compartment with a gasket good enough to avoid sweat and spills and maybe some modest immersion; but not really too broken up about it if a $50 battery needs to be swapped out.
They pass the IP rating test with a new phone that’s never been subjected to any sort of wear or use, so the gasket and the back cover are in perfect shape and seated together nicely.
To get an IP67 rating you basically dip the phone in 1 meters of water, very carefully so any air that’s trapped inside the covers would keep the water from seeping in through the cracks. You keep it there for 30 minutes and then lift it back out. For IP68 the minimum requirement is 1.5 m for 30 minutes.
That’s it. There’s no tumbling or bumping the device in any way, no flexing of bending that could compromise a gasket – no dust or pocket lint that’s worked its way between the seam. Meanwhile, in the real world, the phone is designed so the back cover with the gasket will fly off on impact anyways.
If you have a phone that has a gasket for waterproofing, that’s basically just rain and splash-proof. If you drop it in a puddle, it’s gonna die.
It’s going to be a whole lot cheaper for Nintendo to update the Switch 2 to be lightly water resistant by adding a thin gasket than it would be to engineer a completely replaceable battery. I’d expect the next version o the Switch 2 to suddenly come with very mild water resistance in order I avoid having to provide a new unit with replaceable battery.
There’s a fan in there for active cooling, so maybe it’s not that easy. I would be excited if someone designs a water tight case with active cooling. It sounds very possible but you’ll either need to transfer heat through the water barrier or punch a hole for a heat pipe
“there’s never such a thing as ‘too much’ RTV silicone”
My Suzuki oil pan would beg to differ…
Too much silicone is a classic beginner wrench’s mistake.
It squishes into the engine and ends up in your oil and water passages.
A basic, engine destroying, F-up.
For engines that’s indeed a fair argument to make, much like the difference between red & grey RTV silicone :)
If you’re merely sealing up some electronics, you may as well pot the thing in RTV, barring heatsinks/fans getting blocked. Just makes clean-up later on a nightmare, of course.
Easy to criticise, but it’s actually hard to make a user replaceable battery unit that is also waterproof. And especially when you’re trying to make a small device…. I have gone thru at least 4 such product developments and its much harder than it looks… gaskets are a thing, getting a even pressure on the seal is a hard thing.
Oh no, the billion dollar companies will have to spend a bit more on r&d. Surly it’s cheaper to just bribe a politician.
Aren’t gopros and such waterproof and have a battery you can swap? Same with various toys.
Same with non-smart electronic watches.
Same with tons of other devices.
You could argue maybe that it’s hard to make a thin flat but wide device waterproof and with replaceable battery though.
Now watch manufacturers make a swath of “water resistant” devices to flout the spirit of rules, purely for the sake of corporate greed.
I’d say most all watches are waterproof, and have had a way to change the battery. Even the mechanical ones have a back that can open for ages.
Perhaps all the ‘smartwatches’ (I would not classify them as watches at all) are the exception in regards to replaceable batteries, but they still always have been waterproof AFAIK.
It’s sad that they have effectively killed their own legislation… Those of you in the EU should start a campaign of complaining to your politicians…
Truth be told, while crazy, this is probably the least crazy thing EU politicians have done in recent years. Just look at the Digital Services Act and Article 10 of the ECHR….
So now everyone will claim their device is waterproof and doesn’t need replaceable batteries. The new regulations really didn’t need changed, just make the batteries replaceable and tell people they could void the warranty and make it not waterproof if they do it badly. Even if the average person lacks the skills to confidently do it right being able to go to a repair shop to make sure it is sealed properly afterwards would be a lot better than not having replaceable batteries.
The phone battery thing is ridiculous too and is definitely just folding to pressure or bribes from phone manufacturers. There is no reason the phone manufacturers couldn’t make phones with replaceable parts, it just wouldn’t fit with their goal of making them as thin as possible to the detriment of everything else but it would also mean they would make less from their repair services.
At least there is one potential bonus, currently phone manufacturers can use as low lifespan a battery as they want to force people to get it replaced, now maybe 500 cycles and 83 % usable capacity will be the minimum.
I’m old school pre internet and Internet devices. Anything that uses a battery should be required to let the user change it and it should be available for purchase by multiple vendors.
I think that maybe somebody told Von Der Leyen that when you can remove the battery it means you can turn the whole phone off, and that then you can’t track people 24/7. Oops..
1 step forwards, 3 steps back… Overripe old prunes in power, they think they will be remembered fondly, nope. These politicians are just traitors to the constituents, they sell us for personal gain.