It didn't have a removable battery, but I used to use an older Asus Zenfone 3 ZE552KL that really kicked arse.

It had cards slots, a headphone jack, a built in radio that used wired headphones for signal, and the damned thing was as reasonably waterproof as I could imagine a smartphone to be. It's camera was pretty great for the price, too.

Well, one day it fell very hard on a sharp rock, and the screen shattered. The crack made a hole a few milimeteres deep, and it was about a centimetre wide. It might not sound like much, but the crack in the screen was very much there. My happy arse managed to then have it fall out of my pocket and right into the flush of a high-powered toilet.

I left it to dry for one day, and it worked almost like new again. It still powers up today, but the since security updates stopped years ago, i don't use it anymore. IIRC, it wasn't too expensive, but I forget if there was a sale going on at the time.

I hope I can find another phone like that around that general price point one day. I can dream haha.

Mine still does. 2 Sim slots and a SD slot. Not one of those Sim/sd combo ports.

EU to the rescue

AlL tHe bEtTeR tO wAtErPrOoF yOu WiTh, My DeAr

A couple of years ago I got fed up with replacing phones because the battery wouldn't hold a charge, so I bought a new-in-box, then-six-year-old LG V20. It has some problems, chiefly bizarrely poor reception, but by God it has a removable battery and a headphone jack! I was going to replace it with the Fairphone when that came to the USA but when I saw how expensive the Fairphone was, I decided to stick with the V20.

(The funny thing is that by the time I need to replace the battery, I probably won't be able to buy one anymore.)

Having worked in the industry at that time, there were 2 main reasons they did it like that

• batteries were quite unreliable and failed often
• mfgrs couldn't afford to have one year warranties and send out field replacement units for a battery

And the reasons they stopped doing it..

• batteries got better
• battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
• replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing

I think they should still be replacible, but they should have better connectors that are sealed off from the rest of the device. It costs a tiny bit more to do that engineering though.

With early smart phones generation there was basically a race to thinner smartphones. Replaceable batteries need a protective shell so it wouldn’t get damaged easily when idiots fumble with it when they replace the battery. But the protective shell takes up space. So the first thing they did to make phones thinner was to remove the replaceable battery and just use a battery without a protective shell. Also Apple proofed that most people don’t care so all the Android phone makers followed suit.

Grandma is right on this one!

More and more they are trying to turn everything into a black box. I am assuming it is more convenient and profitable for them.

It was stopped because Apple wanted you to deal with their service technicians in their stores using their parts directly. They make zero dollars if you replace your spicy pillow with a 3rd party amazon battery.