Why smartphone makers stopped using removable batteries, and why they're making a comeback
News Mobile Smartphones Why smartphone makers stopped using removable batteries, and why they're making a comeback The ability to replace my phone's battery? 6, 2026 12:30 pm EST Thongchai S/Shutterstock There was a time when replacing a phone's battery was as easy as popping the back cover off and lifting the battery from its slot with your fingernail. While you can still find a few devices with easily replaceable batteries these days, the design isn't anywhere near mainstream anymore.
- ▪News Mobile Smartphones Why smartphone makers stopped using removable batteries, and why they're making a comeback The ability to replace my phone's battery?
- ▪6, 2026 12:30 pm EST Thongchai S/Shutterstock There was a time when replacing a phone's battery was as easy as popping the back cover off and lifting the battery from its slot with your fingernail.
- ▪While you can still find a few devices with easily replaceable batteries these days, the design isn't anywhere near mainstream anymore.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2227779/smartphone-developers-stop-making-removable-batteries-reason/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T16:35:48.067Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T16:35:48.067Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | PnGiY19_J9wB · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News Mobile Smartphones Why smartphone makers stopped using removable batteries, and why they're making a comeback The ability to replace my phone's battery? Yes, please. By Mariella Moon Aug. 6, 2026 12:30 pm EST Thongchai S/Shutterstock There was a time when replacing a phone's battery was as easy as popping the back cover off and lifting the battery from its slot with your fingernail. While you can still find a few devices with easily replaceable batteries these days, the design isn't anywhere near mainstream anymore. They're pretty much obsolete, and there are many reasons why they are, which we'll get to later. But a soon-to-be-implemented European Union regulation could bring some form of them back in the near future.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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