Maybe next time they'll offer replaceable batteries, which would have made this situation much less painful and is generally a plus for consumers anyway...
To make the battery replaceable while still providing the same amount of energy would require a thicker case around the battery, thicker contacts, and a discrete accessible compartment in the phone. All of this adds up to a much bigger phone. The days of replaceable batteries are over.
The chase for the thinnest device possible is plain stupid, the current devices with a replaceable battery are already thin enough to fit in a pocket, why go even further if it's such an inconvenience? For me, not having a replaceable battery is a very good reason to avoid buying such a device.
This race to the thinnest in mobile computing is going way too far for some years now, which sacrifices many things with no real gain: useful ports getting replaced by clunky adapters, modular components are replaced with glue, heat dissipation getting more challenging and finally loosing space for putting in batteries. You even regularly see oddities such as camera lenses sticking out of the back of a phone, leaving them unprotected, people putting their phone into cases because this thin things terribly fit your hand during usage and finally people carrying around external batteries all the time because the device obviously carries too little of them.
Additionally, pushing the device to the thinnest possible by not protecting the battery well enough was AFAIK the root cause of the problem at hand.
I completely agree. Is there any practical reason for this or is it just the best way these companies have come up with to try to convince people to buy a new phone every 18 months?
> To make the battery replaceable while still providing the same amount of energy would require a thicker case around the battery, thicker contacts, and a discrete accessible compartment in the phone.
The LG V20 just launched with a replacable battery. The phone is 0.3mm thinner than the Note 7, and its battery has 3200 mAh vs. 3500 mAh for the Note 7 battery.
And do you think it would still provide a tangible disadvantage to the user apart from maybe a style statement? The only relevant change I feel would be that it might get easier to keep in your hand.
I'm not speaking to matters of style. These are matters of convenience. If one wants to carry a device around all day, one wants it to be light and to actually work all day.
Even if they can figure out the problem and fix it to the point that they can offer refurbished Note 7s, seems risky. Unless they decide to actively brick existing Notes, there's the likelihood that some existing users will just hold on to their unfixed Note 7s. If these unfixed phones were to explode, it'd take days for authorities to confirm that they weren't the refurbished/fixed versions, and we'd have the same cycle of confusion and negative PR that Samsung is currently undergoing.
