The EU proposes new law that will make your phone’s batteries easier to replace
A lot of our modern day gadgets, like our smartphones, use lithium ion batteries. Unlike the good old days of the feature phone where you could pop out the battery and replace it in seconds, some manufacturers have made it difficult to replace the batteries in modern day phones.
In some cases, there is a lot of glue used and the battery might be integrated with other components, meaning that swapping it out will require some technical know-how and the tools. That might change in the future as the EU has put forward a new law that they hope will make the replacement of smartphone and laptop batteries easier.
This law will basically take us back in time to the feature phone days where batteries can be easily swapped out by the customers themselves. This is a huge deal not just for consumers, but also companies like Apple, Samsung, and so on, who will need to rethink the design of their phones to make it so that the batteries can be easily replaced.
The bad news is that this is currently only a proposal. This means that there are several stages it needs to go through to be approved and be made into law, and that could take a while. Also, should this law ever come to pass, companies will have three and a half years to comply with the new regulations, which means that it could be a while before we start seeing smartphones with removable batteries, but it’s still a good start.
Source: XDA Developers