the EU has recently passed a new
regulation that smartphone manufacturers
will have to abide by if they want to
continue selling in the European market
all new smartphones are going to need to
have user replaceable batteries in them
by 2027. now this was actually a pretty
common feature on phones back in the day
at least on every phone but iPhones
because they never had removable
batteries but on the Android platform
user removable batteries were pretty
much a standard thing and this actually
used to be one of the big selling points
of having an Android phone over an
iPhone because none of the phones back
then really had what you would consider
to be an all-day battery life I mean
maybe if your phone was remaining idle
for most of the time you could get
through the whole day without it dying
but the idea of using your phone the
whole day on a long international flight
or letting it idle for several days was
out of the pitcher also the phones back
then didn't charge nearly as fast so
once you plugged it in you had to sit by
the outlet for a while if you wanted to
keep using your iPhone but the Android
Chads of 10 plus years ago could just
take another fully charged battery out
of their pocket or out of their
backpacks pop the back off their phone
swap it with the Dead one and then boot
their phone back up all in about one
minute and if you think about it this
still blows away the charging capacity
of the fast charging phones of today
because none of them can give you an
additional 2 000 or so milliamp hours of
battery life in 60 seconds like you can
get with a battery swap on a Galaxy S3
today's Android phones have Hardware
that's almost indistinguishable from the
iPhone especially now that the next gen
iPhone 15s are supposed to also have
USBC charging ports although that
specific change came from another
earlier EU regulation the that requires
all the phones to use the same charging
ports by 2024 but this new regulation to
require removable batteries could be a
real game changer for the smartphone
industry people could start packing
multiple internal batteries to use in
their phones for long trips and this
would be really handy when people are
driving especially if you have multiple
people that are in a car and it's an
older car where you can't all charge
your phones at once we could see things
like people just pulling over to get gas
periodically and then swapping their
batteries at that point and you know one
side effect that this is probably going
to have
is external power Banks becoming less
popular like I'm sure that the larger
ones that have high enough wattage to
run PCS and power tools off of them will
probably still be around because they
have a whole lot more utility but those
smaller power banks that just have USB
Outlets they're just going to look like
a bulkier less efficient alternative to
battery swapping especially if you have
something that can charge multiple
smartphone batteries at once that's
something that I would really like to
have as someone that occasionally uses
multiple phones to film things and
another major change they'll probably
see is people actually keeping their
phones for longer periods of time
for several years now smartphones have
had specifications that are really
similar to mid-range laptops eight
gigabytes of RAM multi-core processors
and high definition cameras are standard
even on cheap phones and these
specifications are perfectly fine for
most people that just use their phones
for social media messaging calling ride
sharing really about 95 of everything
that people do on their phones and the
only real reason that modern smartphones
start getting slow besides software
bloat of course is because their
operating systems will start to
undervolt the processors in order to
prolong the phones on time when it has a
degrading battery and this is why you
might have felt like your phone all of a
sudden got a lot faster after you took
it to a repair center or you mailed it
in to have the battery replaced I think
for a lot of people instead of of just
buying a new phone every three to five
years people are going to start buying
new phones only when they become damage
Beyond repair or some major smartphone
Innovation is made that really makes you
want to go out and get a new one but
let's be real what Innovations have even
been made to smartphones in the last 10
years or so the biggest improvements
that I've seen have been to the cameras
and of course them adding multiple
cameras onto the phones but smartphone
image quality is never going to be able
to compete with proper mirrorless
cameras because they just have much
larger sensors and being able to change
the lens on your camera gives you a
whole new domain of functionality that
these fidget spinner camera arrays that
have become standard on smartphones are
just an overpriced imitation of I think
we could see a really large erosion to
the sales volume of smartphones
worldwide because of this because I also
doubt that smartphones with removable
batteries are just going to be localized
to Europe so Samsung Apple the dozen or
so Chinese film manufacturers they're
going to start making these phones with
removable batteries for all markets and
so if the smartphone can become
something that people can actually keep
for six years or more
one of the changes I think we might see
is a transition to people buying
Flagship devices more often instead of
mid-range phones because you might as
well pay twice as much for the phone if
you're able to keep it for twice as long
the buy it for life mentality can
finally be somewhat applied to
smartphones because of this and of
course in our society a lot of people
see the smartphone as a status symbol so
maybe more people are going to buy into
that if they can actually keep the thing
for more than five years but there's
likely going to be some downsides to
this removable battery transition as
well I believe that greed was the
primary motivator for Batteries being
embedded in our devices in the first
place because it lets the manufacturer
charge you for a repair service in three
years but of course this isn't the
reason that we were given for the new
smartphone Paradigm the two excuses that
I use usually here four embedded
batteries is that sealing the phone up
gives it better water resistance and
embedded batteries ultimately allow you
to put a larger capacity battery in a
smaller phone chassis so if we assume
that there is some truth to these claims
made by manufacturers we could start
seeing a regression in battery life for
One battery and the whole idea of water
resistant devices just starting to fade
out but honestly I feel like that's a
bit of a fair trade-off I mean I could
always use a three-part case to make my
phone actually waterproof because the
phones aren't actually waterproof
they're just water resistant right it's
not something you're supposed to be able
to drop in a pool and let it survive and
even if the battery capacity shrinks by
like 20 percent I wouldn't care if I
could just swap it out for a fresh one
in the middle of the day
so I don't know is that a trade-off that
you guys be willing to make like I said
I think it sounds pretty good to me and
another change that I just thought of is
we might see a reduction in people
keeping their phones naked meaning not
using a case because depending on how
these removable batteries are
implemented like I've had a couple of
smartphones that had removable backs and
removable batteries
and
the first one I didn't have a case for I
think it was my S3 or my S4 because it
was very durable I mean this was before
wireless charging so nobody was making
glass and ceramic phones they were
usually made out of plastic and aluminum
so it's not like they shattered when you
dropped them but oftentimes the back
case would pop off if you dropped your
phone and so if you dropped your phone
on a sidewalk while it's raining or
something like that then your phone
would probably be toast
you're gonna get water right on the
battery and right on the logic board so
that might be a bit of an issue we might
see you know it's really going to be
interesting
seeing the engineering challenge to
build a foam that you could take apart
without any special tools that's able to
maintain a large degree of water
resistance and to be able to put a large
battery inside of there whatever
breakthrough is achieved that makes all
this possible I think we're going to end
up paying a premium for it I just can't
picture a Samsung or Apple keeping the
price tag of Flagship phones around a
thousand dollars and just taking the L
and letting us use them for twice as
long
maybe they won't just raise the MSRP by
a significant amount because that's too
obvious maybe we'll see them getting
their money back in some other way like
getting people to pay for more cloud
storage by cutting the onboard storage
in half and say it was necessary in
order to make the batteries removable
but I still have some hope that we are
living in the best timeline where the EU
is going to continue to pass
manufacturing requirements for
smartphones that finally make them based
again
I really just hope that the next bill
that the EU passes simply reads you will
include Z headphone jack you will
include the expandable storage you will
not lock down the bootloader to prevent
the customization and you will not keep
on adding these silly cameras to the
smartphone you will be allowed to have
only two cameras one on the front and
one on the back and you will comply with
these regulations and you will be happy