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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

In the "battery" section, perhaps it is useful to mention that if you have a phone with a removable battery, you can buy extra batteries (normally $5 each on eBay) and a battery charger (also $5) to charge two batteries at once. You can carry multiple batteries to extend your battery life to a week if you want.

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Just a personal experience: I had bought several ~$20AU iPhone 4S batteries from eBay from different sellers, and while they started off okay their capacity dramatically decreased after a few weeks.

Also I'm unsure on how a device determines battery charge, but I forever had issues with the phone turning off while reporting the battery had ~30% left.

Maybe I didn't treat the batteries correctly, but I can't recall as this was several years ago.

I've had great success ordering OEM Samsung batteries for Galaxy S3 and S5, $3 and $7 respectively, that are still working after several years.

Thanks. I am just going to quote you direct for now and maybe edit it later. (If you object to that, I can remove it.)

What percentage of phones are sold with removable batteries these days? <5% would be my guess. Kind of irrelevant information really. Just stick to "Buy an external USB battery pack for $20 and remember to bring your charging cable with you"

No, it's about 30%. https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/ vs https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3

There's 75 on that chart out the "600 currently popular phones" A bunch of them are obsolete windows phones and variants of low end ones. Under 5% by sales seems reasonable to me.

It might be a much larger percentage of "phones used by poor people." This project is aimed at helping homeless people and those at risk of homelessness. My hope is it also has some appeal for others, such as campers and digital nomads. But the central impetus here is to try to start reducing the incidence of homelessness in this country, which is at epidemic levels. This means helping people with minimal tech that may be on the older side and/or super cheap.

I have added both suggestions (USB battery pack and extra batteries) to the battery power management page.

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