Remember when you could change your phone’s battery?
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…
