Battery finally crapped out on a Samsung S4 tablet. Charging gets it dangerously hot. We’re not risking a fire by plugging it in again. We bought it in 2016.
I thought changing the battery would be easy. Tablets are so much larger than a phone. There’s plenty of room inside to work on them. I paid $90 to replace my phone battery in 2019.
Took the Tablet to uBreakiFix. A reputable phone repair franchise. Estimate $440!!! I damn near passed out. A close friend works there and explained the tablet screen usually breaks when they open the case. Their computer factors in labor plus parts to replace the screen and battery. A 10.1 glass screen is expensive.
A new Samsung S7 tablet is $560 on Amazon. That’s what we just ordered.
Planned obsolescence strikes again.
I’m thankful it’s still worthwhile to replace a phone battery. Phone Batteries go bad after 18 months. It’s worth one battery replacement before shit-canning the phone.
Depends on the design of the tablet. The Tab S4 has an all-glass back that’s glued in place, which is pretty much the worst design for repairability. Not all tablets are as bad as that.
However, there are how-tos and kits for replacing it yourself. To be honest, I don’t think much of most repair shops. A diligent end user will likely have better luck. The repair shop isn’t employing highly-paid professionals. They have people with the bare minimum of training and who are encouraged to “repair” things as rapidly as possible. Do it yourself, take it slow, and watch a few videos on the process, and you’ll likely manage to do it without breaking anything. I repaired a Galaxy S6 phone (also glued-in back glass) and the only thing that went wrong was that some of the internal foil peeled off. No functional problem at all.
The battery kits are cheap in any case; <$60 including basic tools. Probably worth a shot if you’re even remotely handy.
Nope. The battery on my Nokia 6 went south. Several shops quoted me an estimate of $90 to replace it. I found a new-in-box model of the same phone on eBay for $99. Granted, it’s an older model phone, but damn it, I liked it. Replacing it was worth more to me than fixing it.
I like tablets, I’m one of the few I know who use them frequently (an LTE for on the go and a couple of different sized kindles at home). But . . . while I’d love to have a high end one, I can’t ever justify the cost to myself, especially if you take into account the fragility. So I tend to buy Prime day (or otherwise on sale) kindles, because they’re cheap enough at sub $50 (or sub $100 for my 10 inch) that if I do break it (or the cat does) I just grin and bear it.
I think part of the problem for repair is that the dominant tablets are Apple Products, are we know how Apple feels about third party repairs. Most Android tablets are either very, very cheap (in all ways) or extremely high end (Surface, S7, etc) with prices to match - for the first, there’s no point, and the lack of scale on the high end makes after market parts and experience limited.
Good luck! Note that the adhesive becomes much easier to remove when warm. You may be able to use your overheating battery to your advantage! (just unplug before you actually start disassembling)
A lot of this is just plain annoyingly bad design, and in the case of Apple products – where a lot of thought is put into the design – I can only assume the historical difficulty of battery replacement was deliberate.
My cheap old simple and ever-faithful Samsung J3 phone is a great example of the opposite. When the battery started failing very suddenly after about four years – it could barely hold a charge for a day on standby – I figured I’d probably need a new phone. I’d forgotten how easy the battery replacement would be, because it’s designed for the back to pop right off to access the SIM card and MicroSD slots as well as the battery. There’s even a little notch that lets you pry off the back with a fingernail or any little piece of plastic. I ordered a replacement battery from Amazon and just popped out the old and popped in the new one, in about five seconds. It was like replacing the battery in a flashlight. That’s how these things should be built!
I thought the reason that batteries are no longer replaceable is that to minimize phone size but maximize battery life they are filling the entire available volume that isn’t other components with battery. And that this means the battery cannot be a neat removable rectangle.
They may indeed be doing that, but I don’t buy that as an explanation. Virtually all replacement batteries are specialized for specific devices, and there’s no reason they couldn’t be oddly shaped if necessary and still replaceable. I grant you that making batteries permanently built-in could offer some manufacturing and form-factor advantages, but probably not huge ones.
To cite some actual examples, I currently have two devices in which battery replacement will be seriously more complicated that in my simple J3 – a Kindle Paperwhite and an Amazon Fire HD tablet. Neither is designed for user battery replacement, but the batteries for both are simple flat rectangles. The Kindle battery has edge connectors like a circuit board, and the Fire battery has a miniature cabled plug. There is no reason both devices could not have been designed simply to make the batteries more easily accessible.
A couple of other factors:
- Weather resistance (IP ratings) are becoming more popular. An easily removable backplate isn’t easy to make water resistant.
- There’s a bigger focus on “premium” materials and design. A flimsy removable backplate makes for an easily removable battery, but doesn’t look premium. A seamless glass backplate, with no screws or the like, is never going to be easy to remove. It pretty much mandates glue.
There is certainly an element of bad design, and some phones/tablets don’t even have these excuses. But not everything can be blamed on that either.
Jesus! Whatever happened to the age-old design principle of “form follows function”? “Looks pretty” has never been the sole definition of good design in devices intended to have an actual use, and when it dominates over functionality, it’s the epitome of bad design, which was kind of my point.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but when people buy devices, they aren’t thinking about how easily it’ll be to replace the battery in a couple of years. Therefore there is no value in it for the manufacturer and they have no reason to design for it. But an attractive device does attract people to buy it. The overwhelming trend therefore has been to make devices more attractive at the expense of repairability. Thinness and environmental resistance are bonuses on top.
Also, metal backs interfere with RF signals, so you want plastic or glass backs. And apparently people think plastic is too cheap-looking. And batteries now are often soft pouches.
OK, I guess we don’t really disagree, but I just regard it as a deplorable trend driven in part by tasteless and impractical consumers (and in part by manufacturers who see a big market in Bright and Shiny rather than functional and practical.
One sees this difference quite dramatically in product areas that have both professional and consumer versions, such as audio and video equipment. To me, the professional versions – such as audio equipment intended for recording studios – have the elegant look of the timeless form-follows-function principle. The consumer versions often look odd and pretentious. The irony of it is that consumer versions sometimes try to mimic their professional counterparts out of recognition of the fact that to the discerning eye it actually does look better, but even then they often manage to make it look chintzy and artificial. Just my opinion.
FWIW, Surface isn’t a native Android tablet. Unless you’re referring to Surface Duo which is, but no one would call Duo extremely high end (well, except for the price).
Certainly true for me. Partly also because batteries are getting better. I usually upgrade my phone every two years, and I’m very sensitive to battery life, because I use my phone for backcountry hiking, with no recharge for a week or more. None of my last 3 or 4 phones have deteriorated noticeably in two years, so the useful life of modern batteries must be at least 3-4 years.
So yeah, I’m not afraid to admit that for me these design traits are good design. I’ll definitely trade slightly larger battery, slightly slimmer phone, better water resistance, and even aesthetics, for a replaceable battery.
You pay for it, though. Consumer devices must make compromises since the competition is so tough. But pro equipment has lots of profit margin and manufacturers can afford to overbuild it. Plus, I have a suspicion that while pro equipment buyers may be a little more discerning than typical consumers, they nevertheless have certain behavioral quirks. For example–taking a complete guess–I’d suspect that heavy devices carry a certain cachet with pro buyers. Even when plastic might be the superior material for whatever reason, I suspect that metal may be substituted just to give a thing a “professional heft”.
Incidentally, while the overall trend is toward hermetically sealed devices, it’s not completely universal. There is the Fairphone, explicitly designed for easy repairs–not just the battery, but camera, speaker, and other parts.
It’s a little bit thicker than other phones, a little bit uglier, a little bit more expensive, and a little bit worse in almost all ways except repairability. It’s not really taking the world by storm but they do seem to have carved out a niche. So there is some demand out there. It just doesn’t resonate with most consumers.
Putting aside the subjective aspect of “aesthetics”, the factors you cite are entirely functional ones. They are not the primary areas of functionality that concern me, but they are certainly valid ones. Incidentally, the original battery on my cheap old Samsung J3 lasted more than four years. The replacement one is actually higher capacity, and it easily goes two weeks between charges on standby with some minimal amount of voice calls and texting.
I would also add that if you depend on your phone during back country hiking, presumably both for keeping in touch and for potential emergencies, then putting any kind of priority on Bright and Shiny aesthetics seems like a very badly misplaced priority.
Well, sure, and it’s certainly not high on my list of considerations. But then having a replaceable battery is just as useless as having a pretty phone in that context.
Yeah, the other reason I’m reasonably sure that useful battery life in modern phones must generally be of the order of 4 years is depreciation. I’m a sucker for getting the latest phone, which implies the maximum possible depreciation; and I still always get back ~40% of the value in trade-in after two years. So something useful is happening with these phones for at least another couple of years.