2545 - Forbidden

Recently my mobile began to crash regularly and progressively. It’s a Samsung Galaxy S2, about two years old and in daily use.

What happened was, that it crashed and automatically rebooted, and after the reboot the battery was almost empty, even when it had just been loaded. Taking the battery out, waiting for a minute, putting the battery back in and booting again would normally help and the battery would again have the expected charge.

To me it suspiciously looked like damage in the circuit that measures battery voltage. Somewhere on the Net I read that normally these circuits can (and need to) be calibrated at times, that the circuit in the Galaxy S2 has calibration disabled, but that taking the battery out for a few minutes would force auto-calibration. That’s why I tried the battery voodoo.

As I said, it used to help, but the problem was progressive, and after a few weeks I decided I couldn’t wait for the Google Nexus 5 (as I had intended) and needed to buy a new mobile now.

There was only one thing that I wanted to try first. Original Samsung batteries for the S2 are to be had for around a dozen Euros, so, although I strongly suspected the electronics (after all, a dying battery would just discharge faster, not cause crashes, would it?), I decided to buy a new battery first.

What can I say? It fixed the problem and saved me at least 320 Euros 🙂

The moral of the story? Don’t ever think of buying a device with irreplaceable batteries! For me that changes the market drastically. Not that I’d ever buy Apple, but apart from the closed-ness of the system, here is another reason now. Actually I think Apple has started this madness with the iPhone 3.

OK, that’s not totally correct. For around $80 Apple offers a replacement service, shipping extra. Yeah, sure 🙂

All the new Nokia Lumias? Forget them. But it’s not wine and roses in Android land either. In fact none of the premium models seems to have replaceable batteries any more, regardless of manufacturer, with one single exception, and that is Samsung.

Cool, huh? A single manufacturer is left for me after my experience. What a great moment for Samsung to begin acting up 🙄

Well, if you’re an Apple user, you don’t have alternatives anyway, and for everybody else it may be a problem or not. My battery may even have been an exception and my experience uncommon. I just thought I’d tell you anyway.

The Song of the Day is “Forbidden Fruit”, written by John Zorn, interpreted by Kronos Quartet on their 1988 album “Winter Was Hard”. Hear it on YouTube.