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Comment by andrewbadera | Hacker News Reader

My first thought as well. Battery life on my Incredible is poor at best as it is. I don't want to pony up for an oversize battery and wreck the profile, I need it to fit in a case/holster/mount/etc.

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How fast does battery technology progress? I've replaced a few batteries in iPods and Nintendo DS's and I'm fairly certain they were rated much higher than the stock ones, while being surprisingly cheap.

Does it go fast enough to make a material difference between choosing a phone with or without user accessible batteries and purchasing a newer battery 6 or 12 months later?

Interesting, I've never thought about replacing a phone battery with a higher-end model (can you tell I have an iPhone?) I'm curious as to the actual battery life gains one would see and the effect on weight , etc.

I must have benchmarks!

From what I've seen extended life batteries for phones tend to be 100-200mAh larger than stock batteries. So I think that would work out to a ~10% improvement for most phones. It really depends on the capacity of the OEM battery. I remember seeing a 2000mAh+ battery for the EVO which would be nearly a 25% improvement over the stock battery.

Historically, battery tech progress has been depressingly slow. Slow enough to be the primary limiting factor for a lot of technologies. The vast majority of progress has been in reducing power consumption rather than increasing power storage.

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