In 2017, I bought my first smartphone (after previously making do with a dumbphone). Recently, after I’d used it for over a year, I noticed it wasn’t working as well as did when I first got it. A full charge didn’t last for more than a couple hours. Apps would stop working for no apparent reason. Something had gone wrong. Given that this phone cost around $30, it wouldn’t bother me too much if it didn’t get to the 2nd anniversary of its purchase date — but it would bother me a little. Far better to get 3 years of use out of a $30 phone than just a year and a half. I thought getting a new phone battery was worth a try, so that’s what I did.
You might think, given that there are over 200 million cellphones in use in the United States (and many millions more no longer in use, headed for or already in a landfill), that phone batteries would be easy to find in the same shops that sell phones. That is not the case, at least not in my experience. Naturally, I looked to the internet. The first battery I ordered was worse than the one that was already in the phone. I communicated this to the vendor and immediately received a full refund — without even having to return the bad battery. On the second try I got a better battery from another vendor and it worked perfectly. My phone functions like it did when it was new. A full charge lasts all day. All the apps work as they should.
The replacement battery cost about $9 and should extend the life of my old (or maybe it’s middle-aged) phone by at least a year. If I continue to replace batteries instead of phones as much as possible, the number of phones I’ll buy over my lifetime will be cut in half. Say, a new phone every 3 or 4 years instead of every year or two.
