It seems that everywhere you go, with phones, mids, etc, everyone's got their own proprietary battery and it only works in a select number of models, and those models rarely last more than a few years before they're replaced, thus creating a real problem.

I know it took a lot of twisting of arms to get the industry to finally standardize on miniusb for the charger interface. How long before they standardize on batteries too?

http://www.hanno.de/blog/2008/the-battery-rant/

[SEINFELD]What's the deal with batteries?[/SEINFELD]

allnameswereout: Yeah, that's a great link. I really think this whole "unique to the device" battery thing is stupid. As the author pointed out, AA was standardized in the 1950's and everyone abides by it. So why can't they do that with batteries in portable devices now? Having a selection of maybe 10 different sizes, all with standardized elements would be the preferred way to do things. But as the article author pointed out, "planned obsolescence" is at work here. They "WANT" it to fail so you'll be forced to buy the next new gadget when it comes out.

That's stupid and the car makers tried that and it totally blew up in their face. If the electronics makers don't get a clue soon, that's gonna blow up in their face as well. And I bet ya at some point someone's gonna come out with an easily changeable, standardized battery and put everyone else in a lurch.

The catch is, who's gonna be first? At the rate we're going, nobody.

The trouble is nobody wants to commit to a certain standard, and not only because of planned obsolescence. When A(A)(A) batteries came along, the size and rate of development allowed that format to settle in. Today, the device form factors are generally smaller and changing so rapidly, nobody wants to settle down and limit himself to certain form factors and battery technologies. Also, the limited life expectancy od Li-ion batteries (and the super-flexible form factor of Li-po batteries) does not favor rigid, decade-long formats.

Another problem are voltages. AA was 1.5, but today's battery technologies have a dozen 'native' form factors and voltages (how many Li-ion AA cells have you seen ?). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recharg...y_technologies

So, unfortunately, there are actually technical problems to saying 'oh, we're gonna use these 5 batteries for the next 50 years', not just big bad battery/gadget corporation attitude.

I don't mind different batteries. As attila77 pointed out, technology changes so fast that it doesn't make sense to choose a standard.

What I hate are different standards for USB and charging.

Yes, USB is a different story. I could very well envision a DC power supply standard based on it. Instead of the bricks with a hundred connectors, you could have USB style connectors in power extenders or even wall connectors. This would also be more power efficient then the 'remove charger' thing.

Hmm, you are right about the speed at which things are changing. That was one of my complaints 10, even 20 years ago was that battery technology was improving at a crawl, and the batteries we had in the 1980's and 1990's weren't much better than their 1950's and 1960's counterparts.

It was only after the tech boom that you really saw battery technology take off. As much as I hate the fact that we don't have a standardized form factor, the idea that battery tech is finally advancing by leaps and bounds and is now approaching the level it should have been at years ago at least makes me feel good. It sucks not having a common form factor, but I guess if we benefit from better batteries in the end, that's perfect.

I'm am totally convinced that vendors deliberately make slightly different batteries for different models, and in particular for new models. This is just to force you to buy a new phone when the old battery wears out.

I have kept buying mobile phones since 1997 and they are all in perfectly working shape, but useless, because I can't get batteries to them. I have occasionally bought a new battery (including original vendor-made batteries), but the new battery has always turned out to be about as bad as the one I was replacing, simply because the new battery is really a very old one which has been sitting on a shelf for probably as long as I was using my old battery.

So, in the end, I must buy a new phone instead. Which I just did. I liked the old phone much better, and the previous one before that one as well, but no battery, no use.

If there were some kind of general battery specification out there, used by all vendors, we would also have a better turnaround of batteries so that there would be a good chance of actually getting a fresh battery (and they could also throw in a 'best before', or 'production month/year' stamp on the batteries as well).

Obviously there's a need for more than a single lithium battery size and shape, but there are perfectly working standards for non-rechargables and we could have a limit of maybe five or six types.

I hear there's work in progress to unify the type of charger for phones (let's hope they agree on a proper connector like what Nokia has been using and not one of those crappy multi-connectors). No reason not to enforce the same with the batteries themselves.

The batteries used in Nokia N800 and Nokia N810 are widely used in many other Nokia phones. For example, my Nokia N810 has the same battery as my Nokia E71.