there are very few people who would prioritize a replaceable battery over other features.
I gotta gently push back against this. You may not know them personally, but there are a LOT of people who have gone back to dumbphones over this. IMO, this is a large part of why dumbphone sales are catching up on smartphone sales for the first time in years. I even know some elderly folks who stopped using cell phones entirely when smartphones stopped having replaceable batteries (easier going back to having a landline when one is retired/not raising kids, of course).
There are very few people who buy the currently existing smartphones who would prioritize this feature, yes – because anyone who does prioritize this feature has been excluded from the entire smartphone market for several years now.
It’d also go well with modern battery packs, because you can just have a spare battery sitting and charging away in your bag, and can swap it on the fly, without having to have a cable dangling about that might get caught on things, or bent the wrong way.
The only downside with a replaceable battery is that you have to switch the phone off to do it, but that’s small potatoes for effectively charging the phone to full in an instant.
Back when I had a LG V20 I didn’t even bother to plug in the phone, I would just swap the batteries once or twice a day and never need to worry about charging. Super useful, especially when you’re away from home.
Side note, I wonder if it would be possible to add a second smaller battery to the phone to keep the phone on for the minute or two that you’re swapping the battery, so it never needs to turn off. It’s not a huge issue, but it would be pretty convenient if possible.
I gotta gently push back against this. You may not know them personally, but there are a LOT of people who have gone back to dumbphones over this. IMO, this is a large part of why dumbphone sales are catching up on smartphone sales for the first time in years. I even know some elderly folks who stopped using cell phones entirely when smartphones stopped having replaceable batteries (easier going back to having a landline when one is retired/not raising kids, of course).
There are very few people who buy the currently existing smartphones who would prioritize this feature, yes – because anyone who does prioritize this feature has been excluded from the entire smartphone market for several years now.
It’d also go well with modern battery packs, because you can just have a spare battery sitting and charging away in your bag, and can swap it on the fly, without having to have a cable dangling about that might get caught on things, or bent the wrong way.
The only downside with a replaceable battery is that you have to switch the phone off to do it, but that’s small potatoes for effectively charging the phone to full in an instant.
Back when I had a LG V20 I didn’t even bother to plug in the phone, I would just swap the batteries once or twice a day and never need to worry about charging. Super useful, especially when you’re away from home.
Side note, I wonder if it would be possible to add a second smaller battery to the phone to keep the phone on for the minute or two that you’re swapping the battery, so it never needs to turn off. It’s not a huge issue, but it would be pretty convenient if possible.