New EU legislation obliging smartphone manufacturers to make it easier for users to replace their batteries will come into force in September and will be mandatory for all manufacturers a year and a half later. This is one of those ideas that goes back to the way in which many of us chose a smartphone a long time ago, when it was logical to think that a battery should be just that, something that you could, at any time, open the terminal and replace it with another full one that you had in your pocket.
The issue, as usual, is not as simple as it seems. The text of the law says that batteries must be replaceable “with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools,” and that spare parts must be available for up to seven years after the launch of the terminal and; perhaps most importantly, that “the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman”.
This opens the door to two very different possibilities: the first is that, as was the case before manufacturers opted for completely closed models, we can carry one or more batteries in our pocket to replace them when they start to weaken in their charge. The second, completely different, refers to the fact that we can open our terminal and replace its battery with another when it has reached a suboptimal level of performance. These are two different issues, but both are important: the first refers to day-to-day use, the second to the average life of the terminal, since battery life is often the trigger for replacement.
The demand from users has been evident for a long time. The sealed design of the terminals can be understood as a way of making them more compact, more waterproof or more resistant: in the past, smartphones could not even withstand being near water and would separate into several pieces if dropped (something that possibly helped them to deteriorate less, as this disassembly absorbed part of the energy of the blow), whereas now there are many models that can be submerged in water. The idea of carrying a backup battery in your pocket was, for many years, something I demanded from a handset: in fact, I usually bought the handset and an extra battery. From there, we moved on to cumbersome external batteries to recharge the one that was inaccessible inside, and Apple even sells a magnetic attachment so that you don’t have to carry the battery attached by a cable, but it’s obviously not the same as the convenience of opening the handset easily with your fingernail and replacing the battery without further ado.
Obviously, it is by design more complicated to make the inside of a terminal that can be easily opened with a fingernail watertight and dust-free than one that comes sealed from the factory or can only be opened with specialized tools. But have we consumers really gained from this change? After many years of experience, it’s quite possible that most people would say no.
The second issue, about changing the battery at home with reasonably simple tools and thus prolonging the life of the handset, is more complex, because the definition:
“A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialized tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it.”
This leaves open the possibility that we may have to purchase tools that, while not defined as specialized, cost more than what the average user is willing to pay. In that sense, the quality requirements of the batteries, that they maintain 83% of their capacity after five hundred charge cycles and 80% after one thousand cycles, may be more important, because they would offer an average life of almost five years of use (and after five years, a new model is probably a more attractive option). But in any case, the alternative is very different from opening the handset with your fingernail and changing the battery in an instant, and allows other design options.
After years of designing sealed smartphones, and with the industry moving towards watertight models, which is closely linked to built-in obsolescence, the EU legislation is a major setback for manufacturers, and will require numerous redesigns. But for users, it may well bring enough benefits to justify them.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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