How new is a new battery for a phone

How do consumers know that a replacement mobile battery is really new? I have had one that only lasted one year. Phone is out of warranty.

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If you buy directly from the manufacturer, authorised repairers, or their distributor you can be fairly sure it is genuine and should last a reasonable time. It may contain re-conditioned parts if they have advised they may be used, this use is not going to affect the quality of the goods or their longevity. It is done to reduce wastage of items that have no faults. In a battery this might include the logic board or the wiring loom, the actual cells would be replaced.

If you buy at many of the repair shops or kiosks, these are often not genuine parts, they are generic replacements that can vary in quality. While they are designed as replacements for the genuine item, the replacements are often inferior quality and thus cheaper. They may last what is a reasonable period of years or not.

Even genuine parts can have early failures, as the usage patterns of users are so varied it is often only given a period of warranty of 12 months. Do you know that the battery was a genuine manufacturer’s product or was it instead a genuine generic replacement. Another concern can be that the age of the phone may mean there are no genuine parts left and only aftermarket goods remain to fix any issues that arise.

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Yes, that is true, not sure if the battery is even covered by one year warranty by ACCC.

The ACCC provide no warranty on any goods. The Australian Consumer Law (ACL) provides protections for goods and services that consumers purchase, a battery that is replaced in a phone is covered by these guarantees. How long does that protection last, if it was sold as a premium quality or genuine item then it would be expected that its lifetime would exceed that of a cheaper and lower quality replacement. I think in general for most generic replacements the offer is 12 months and I would suspect even under ACL it would be hard to argue for longer protection. If sold as genuine or premium then even after a 12 month period there would be an expectation of longer expected life and quality and so longer expected coverage under ACL. Note that if replaced under warranty, replacement does not extend the warranty but may extend the expected lifetime for ACL purposes.

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Thanks, Grahroll. It was bought out of warranty from an independent store. They only gave me a few weeks insisting the battery is new! I am not a heavy user.

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As indicated by @grahroll above, being an independent store it is highly likely that the battery is a generic/no brand battery of unknown quality.

We have found ourselves that generic/no brand or even dubiously branded (counterfeited) batteries, available online from sites other than the manufacturer, are of poor quality and don’t last long or fail.

It might be worth contacting the manufacturer of your phone to see if they still have OEM replacement batteries for your phone. Hopefully they do, otherwise it will be a bit of potluck to whether any future replacement battery is of reasonable/good quality to provide a good service life.

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thanks. confirmed my suspicions.

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Choice recommend buying second hand mobile through Amazon renewed. At least the phones have been thoroughly checked out.

When my wife’s old Samsung phone battery started to deteriorate, we tried a generic replacement, but it didn’t improve the situation all that much. We then visited a Samsung store where they ordered an official battery for her. However, even that battery didn’t offer much improvement. Eventually, we decided to switch to a different brand of phone for her, and after two years of usage, she hasn’t experienced any battery degradation at all. In contrast, my two-year-old Samsung struggles to last a full day with minimal usage. It’s safe to say that Samsung doesn’t seem to use high-quality batteries.

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It’s also possible that a software update or corruption or misbehaving App has led to a change in how the phone performs. This could also be a cause of shorter battery life.
IE It’s not a battery quality problem.

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It’s possibly a way of making them obsolete. The staff at Samsung were pressuring us to buy a new phone.

It is also possible Samsung underspecifies batteries against the draw their phones require as compared to some other manufacturers.

Another possibility is that Samsungs are also known to come with a good amount of bloatware that if enabled by default and not disabled could help drain the battery faster than expected from just ‘the phone’ and core services.

That could be related to the KPIs for their roles and personal bonuses? For context it has not been too many years since bank tellers existed and always had to offer insurance, investments, and whatever the bank was pushing at the time with every face to face transaction.

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