How Many Android Phones Don’t Have User Replaceable Batteries?
One thing many of us throw into the faces of our iPhone-toting friends and family is the fact that – with most Android phones – you can replace the battery in case you need to pop in a spare (or in case the battery craps out and you need to buy a new one). Our good friend Arne Hess from The Unwired pointed something out with the Xperia X10 Mini that I’d never known before: the battery is not user replaceable.
The phone has a removable back cover for the purpose of personalization and to access the SIM card slot, but there’s no battery to play around with. Obvious reasoning points to the device being small in nature: Sony Ericsson probably had to work the battery into the phone in such a way that accessing and replacing it probably didn’t work out too well (a custom-shaped battery that’s hard to replace without some light tool work comes to mind).
I fully understand their position on that if that’s the case (you only have so much room to fit so many radios into the phone and the battery takes up a lot of that space), but I’m just wondering: are there any other phones without user-replaceable batteries? I personally haven’t heard of it stateside, but perhaps some of the devices more popular in Europe and other parts of the world are iPhone-like in this regard. Chime in if you have a device that doesn’t allow you to replace the juice-packing power source that smartphone users can’t get enough of (literally).