How many often are you planning on replacing the battery in your phone that it would wear out the panel?
The ware would most likely come from someone that has a spare battery that is ready to go. Think of your phone burning 80% of the juice and you’re about to hop on a flight that you’re barely going to make (no time to charge). Slap that stand by battery in and off you go. That’s what I did with my old Nokia or blackberry back in the day. Oh and for my HTC aria.
Sounds stupid, arent there charging ports on planes?
And other than plane where external battery is an issue, i just have a small brick that connect to my phone by the magnets on the back and wireless charges it, this is only really needed if you are doing something all day on the phone, like going around a city, taking pictures
With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.
Honestly for hiking I’d suggest a power bank with solar charge capability. One thing to charge them all.
The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.
Replacing the battery is pretty expensive, so I prefer to optimize my charging patterns so I never ever have to get it replaced. However, if I could do it myself, I might abuse the battery much more. I might even leave my devices plugged in overnight.
Is it though? Batteries themselves are something like $20-60 (e.g. Pixel 8 battery for $43, ebay listing for <$20). The battery is honestly not that expensive, the expensive part is the labor because taking modern phones apart is a massive pain.
It’s about 80-130 € depending on phone model, and that includes work and the battery. If I could just buy a battery online and replace it myself, the prices should be more reasonable. Apparently one day that will actually happen.
