With replacement white strip installed
If this isn’t a scam, I can’t imagine what a valid reason for this design could be.
Cellphone Battery Designed To Fail At First Drop Of Water?
I recently dropped my cell phone into the last sip of coffee I had in my cup, so I know the liquid didn’t penetrate to any meaningful hardware, especially considering I plucked it out immediately. Stickers, on both the inside of the battery casing (on the phone) and the battery itself, were pink/red when I opened the battery cover, however, very little moisture was present. 5 minutes later my phone turned itself off and I wasn’t able to turn it back on until I plugged it into my charger at the end of the day. The phone blinked the ‘Charge Complete’ signal to me almost immediately, but when I unplugged it from the charger it immediately turned off again and I wasn’t able to turn it on without it being plugged into the charger.
Here’s where the super-sketchiness comes into play. I noticed that the pink sticker on the battery was covering an indented rectangular area, so I pulled off the sticker which revealed two small brass sensors. When I cut out and installed a plain piece of white paper to replace the color changed sticker, the phone miraculously began taking a charge again and when I unplugged it from the charger, it didn’t turn off.
It is also my opinion that they have gone so far as to implement ‘water activated failure mechanisms’ into phones and batteries in an effort to create replacement sales for products that aren’t really damaged.
This is done for a reason. If you really did drop your whole phone say into a puddle or a bucket of water or the lake then most often damage is caused by a short circuit. Now if you have a safety mechanism that immediately cuts power as soon as it gets wet before a short can happen then your phone may be salvaged. Now beyond that there is also the possibility of a batter overheating and starting on fire due to a short and yes a batter can start on fire underwater.
So you’re saying that you should be able to introduce moisture into an electronic device and expect either (a) the manufacturer to replace it or (b) said device to still work?
Try dumping ‘just a little’ water into the back of your tv, then tell me how good it works and how quickly the manufacturer was to replace it.
Good god people grow up already….take care of your crap, don’t ruin it, and it will be just fine. Goddamn whiners!
I would not blame the US cell phone industry – Americans were dumb enough to fall into the marketing trap of “free” phones with contract.
In China people just buy whatever phone they want and use their old number (sim card) or get a new one. You can buy credits or move it to a monthly account. What could be easier?
Spare cell phone batteries are very cheap (about $10-15) as they are not sold through all the Radio Shacks, Best Buy’s and so on. Selling batteries is what makes money for these stores.
Radio Shack especially! All Radio Shack stores track and set monthly battery sales budgets. If any store or employee fails to meet their battery sales quota there is hell to pay! Every month there are award certificates for sales and there is a battery category. So next time you go into a Radio Shack see if you don’t get offered batteries.
Cheers
Bullcrap !!! It must be a scam.
Why put a piece of paper over a disabling feature? Apparently this two contacts are insulated when covered. They are also part of a sealed unit. While getting batteries wet is not recommended, it should be the circuits that are more in danger of water contact instead of the battery. Yet, if this is a design feature, then where is the warranty that this disabling feature will fail before any of the circuits get wet.
If water is able to enter the battery then it wouldn’t matter if the battery was shorted or not. It is the battery contents (lithium) that are the problem. Not the electrical discharge.
Moisture is a common occurrence in the real world. The phone should be robust enough to tolerate any expected amount of contact with moisture. That includes being in a pocket with the user sweating profusely or having coffee spilled on it. This differentiates it from the “back of a TV” which is not expected to ever see moisture or totally immersing it in water. And yes, I would expect a laptop to be at least equally moisture resistant.
Fusion, don’t be an idiot.
That strip, as bs and MacBandit pointed out, is a safety device, not part of a “scam”.
You’re wrong, boyo. Unacceptable moisture levels reach it well before penetrating into the phone’s innards. It disables the battery, thereby preventing the phone from receiving power while there is presumably a high enough level of moisture in it to destroy the phone, were power applied.
When the strip dries out sufficiently to restore battery function, the phone can safely be presumed to be dry as well, and therefore can once again be safely powered up.
Far from being a scam, it’s a very cheap, simple, reliable and elegant way to prevent inadvertent destruction of a phone, and the attendant replacement cost to the owner. The goddamn thing is there to PROTECT your investment – not turn it into a brick.
I can tell you’ve never been involved in designing electronic equipment, ace. I have, and I have to admire what is a very cheap, simple and effective way to protect the instrument from destruction by the most likely hazard. Quite ingenious. Wish I had thought of it, in fact.
It still smacks of a total lack of understanding the real world.
I would rather buy a good phone that didn’t to tango-uniform at the sight of water, rather than some cheap phone that did. O rings and the like are not new inventions, and if you want to make money Lauren – design a headphone and charger jack that can survive a quick dunking (inductive pickup + ac-dc converter , bluetooth?).
The price of the phone warrants good design; these things retail for $100+, and often much much much more.
#25, Lauren,
I think you missed a few of the most critical issues on this.
There is no publicized “fix” by the cell phone makers about this little “safety” feature. This is their way of voiding a warranty that might have just gone through normal usage. (caught in rain, excess sweating, spilled liquid, etc)
There is no guarantee or even expectation that the “safety” feature would trip before damage is caused to any circuit. Moisture would have to reach this “safety” feature before any other part of the phone internals.
As others (especially #26 point out) “O” rings and gaskets are not new. I can’t think of any consumer product that does not have some degree of moisture resistance. I don’t know how many times my 40 yr old Seiko got dunked, my Olympus C4000 has been rained on and splashed a few times, and my keyboard has more coffee stains than imaginable. Yet they all still work well and are still in use (except my kid got me a new watch for Christmas).
Sheet, my ancient Canon TX has seen more moisture abuse then I care to admit to and yet I know it would work fine with a fresh roll of film. So would all those lenses.
No, I don’t design products. I used to test them and find their limits though. I am well aware of reliability, maintainability, MTBF, Design of Experiment, Pareto Analysis, Failure Analysis, and any number of other testing parameters, regulatory and industry testing standards, and basic engineering principles. No, I didn’t write any books but I have done several training manuals.
Yet I won’t stand upon my experience to suggest you don’t know what you talk about. I have no idea what type of products you “designed”, but I am reasonably certain they weren’t consumer products. This design suggests it protects the manufacturer more than it does the battery or phone.
I have first hand experience with these moisture stickers in cell batteries and Cingular. My girlfriends cell battery had stopped holding a charge, and turning off after about 6 months of use. No rain exposure, no shower exposure, no toilet or sink exposure. She had purchased the additional insurance policy on the phone plan in case anything did happen to the phone, but when we took it in to a Cingular store for service we were flatly told that they wouldn’t even look at it because the sticker had been activated, and that it was company policy to do so and she would have to shell out a minimum of another $100 for a reburbished version of her basic model phone(free with subscription model type). The rep even admitted that it may have simply changed color from being in a humid environment such as a few humid days of weather that may have cumulatively activated the sticker, that it didn’t need to be dunked in water or drenched in rain for it to happen. But it didn’t matter, we were screwed and they wouldn’t even check if it was the battery that was the problem or the phone malfunctioning in some way. This is definitely a protection for the companies and not the end-user.
It may – or may not – be perfected yet, or used as intended… it may be insufficiently mature to be relied upon for warranty purposes… and I don’t doubt for a minute that greedy bastards may be using it as an excuse to push phone sales… but there’s always ways to deal with such things.
Now being aware of this, if I took my phone in on a warranty claim, I would simply remove the battery and tell them that I’ve been scared of batteries since one blew up on me, so I only use the phone when plugged into the power cord in the car. Let ‘em try to get around the absence of a battery to examine.
Anyway, I never said cellphones are perfect – some have excellent track records and others drop like flies – notably the ones you start seeing a few months after their intro being sold at bargain prices, with “refurbished” mentioned in the fine print…
I’ve been carrying a phone for about 12 years now, and I’ve been caught in the rain, sweated like the proverbial pig, spilled drinks, etc, etc… and the only phone that’s gone south on me has been a Moto flip that put it’s legs in the air after a few raindrops on the keypad, which is obviously unacceptable.
Still, a steamy bathroom, dropping it in the toilet, whatever – immersion, period – is not something you have any right to have a cellphone survive. They often do anyway, so quitcherbitchin.
If they designed and built waterproof phones for the lazy sheeple who unreasonablly expect perfection and 100% reliability under all circumstances, at all times, including the abuse they dish out from carelessness and dimbulb acts – they can do that too. But we’ll ALL pay a lot more for that extra reliability that’s demanded by a small minority. As usual, lazy, careless Americans demand their cake and to eat it too – and for everyone else to pick up the check!
Pffft.
and chris – it was your mistake in going to Cingular with the phone and not insisting that they try the phone with a known-good battery. It is in no way an unreasonable request, and I would think it should’ve been obvious. If the personnel at the store refused to do so, a phone call to a supervisor in support would’ve gotten you a concession. They always make it policy to try to turn down users at the first support level, like at the retail counter, but rarely do you have to do much more than make that small extra effort that most people don’t – and which the company knows they won’t, which is why you really don’t have to twist their arm that hard, since so few bother to.
Then by your logic, a $650 Seiko watch should specifically be designed not to be water resistent, in order save $20 in gaskets and careful machining.
I too had a Moto phone stop working after water splashed on it, and will never buy another Moto phone as a result. I vote with my $$ like any good American. Only sheeple settle for second rate.
By my logic nothing.
I just told you why watches are water resistant. You can’t read?
It is easy to seal a watch. The user NEVER OPENS IT. It has NO OPENINGS to the INSIDE.
It is NOT easy to seal anything that has a microphone OR a speaker OR electrical connections that are not intended to be water resistant – let alone something that has ALL of those things.
And the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay $50 more for a fucking cellphone because you can’t be trusted not to drop yours in the toilet.
Crikey®™!
If someone is saying that they are paying monthly for phone insurance and then they were denied an insurance claim for water exposure, they are lying.
It’s interesting to me that people think they can abuse their phones then get upset at the manufacturer for not backing up the warranty against defects for their incompetence.
You have never changed the time on a watch have you?
If you desiged anything, I would hope not to come into contact with it.
FYI: After my Moto (piece of crap) phone that was splashed with water and then allowed to air dry – it connected to the network, rang when someone called, and charged the battery just fine.
However, most of the keys stopped responding and the main screen only displayed the phone’s logo when the phone was powered on (not the other user-interface data).
Even after the splashing, the mini screen showed the time and date, and name or number of the person calling just fine.
Anyway, the phone was poorly manufactured, and I needed an excuse to rid myself of it anyway. Good riddance Motorola, forever.
The Verizon Wireless G’zOne Type–S is engineered to perform, designed to last, and built to survive, it can handle just about anything you throw its’ way. It’s able to withstand the penetrating elements of rain, humidity and even submersion. It is ruggedized, shock resistant and ready to be dropped. Dust resistant, the keypad stays clean, sturdy and fully operational even in the meanest of desert conditions.
#33, There is a difference between normal environmental conditions and abuse. Being moisture resistant is expected. Being water proof is a totally different thing and not expected.
I expect my TV to be moisture resistant to normal humidity, but not to water poured over the circuit boards.
I expect my watch to handle getting wet in rain, but not when I go swimming.
I expect a laptop to be somewhat resistant to spilled liquids, but not having a 32 oz of hot coffee poured into the DVD drive.
I think what you are calling incompetence is well within the realm of normal human behavior. Suggesting any exposure is abuse is truly stretching it.
C’mon, Fusion. You know and I know, Americans are great at fucking stuff up and then trying to blame the manufacturer – invariably, to avoid the consequences of their own ill-advised actions.
The broken products that people actually try to get credit / exchanges for, that are obvious victims of careless. abuse and/or misuse, are the stuff of retail legend… it’s the sort of typical thing that makes Americans Americans – and makes others despise us, for that matter.
#38, Lauren,
C’mon. There are always extremes for everything. If you take some of the extreme complainers and then try to suggest ALL consumers complain to the same degree is just plain wrong.
A cell phone falling for a quick dip in a sink or toilet is not outside the normal things that happen. Cell phones are usually heavy and will often fall out of a pocket. I know mine has on many occasions. Or being caught in a downpour, it happens.
I would suggest (my own standards) that a cell phone should tolerate being dipped in water, such as a sink or toilet, for 10 seconds and still function after being externally dried. And tolerate contact to a warm, perspiring body for a minimum of 3 hours and function. Both these standards mimic real world situations the normal consumer may face. A cell phone is meant to be portable in the real world, not a extremely protective one.
To always blame the consumer for shoddy designs or workmanship is even more wrong.
I don’t “always” blame the consumer – but face it, in a country that half of voted for a frat-boy moran – twice – there’s more than enough clowns to go around. And those clowns misuse the tech products they buy one Hell of a lot more often than product designers fall down on the job. Shoddy workmanship? Fuck that – in the free market, it’s up to the individual to have enough sense not to buy crap; the resulting consumer rejection results in retail failure for inferior products.
It’s not rocket science, you know.