I’ve bought a new rear cover for my Xperia Z1C (camera lens was getting “milky”). Recent experience with phone batteries suggests that they may start to fail after a couple of years – and the phone is 20 months old. Is it as well to fit a new battery while I’m doing the cover (given it’s glued and sealed)?

My Z1 battery was pretty screwed after 2 years.

Samsung s6. Great phone, shit battery, year two may be upsetting.

My Xperia Z is just coming up to 2 years. Seems ok at the moment.

OP Office IT guy used to change his batteries after 18 months as a matter of routine, was convinced that was “optimal” – so my answer would be yes. Mrs B’s iPhone is around 3 years old and battery life has really deteriorated recently

500 charge cycles is a commonly quoted number before capacity drops off. You can extend this by not stressing the battery so hard but given every phone is short on battery capacity to start with you can be sure the batteries are being stressed.

So if you charge every 1-2 days then 18-24months is about right.

As a heads up, Sony Z’s have a tendency to spit up the red light of death if you mess with the battery. Mind you they have a tendency to do that if you dont too.

Old Samsung S2. Batter lasts all day out if I don’t use the internet loads. Probably getting on for about 4 years old at least I’d say. I’d say there’s probably only about a 20% or so reduction in battery life from new.

if the phone is coming apart I would say it’s worth while replacing the battery with a good quality replacement.

Just don’t upgrade to a Z5. The battery in this is worse than my 2 year old Z1. It needs charging 2-3 times a day and it’s only 3 weeks old.

Ulefone Power, battery lasts 2-4 days even with LOTS of Internet / strava / Facebook / sat-nav. Think the lowest I’ve got it in a day is about 40%.

Downside is it takes a full 8 hours to charge even on a 2A charger (it comes with a 9V tablet charger but reviews recommend not using it unless needed to avoid stressing the battery so much).

Old Nokia E72 from 2009, battery only recently playing up after 7 years. Used to go half a week on a charge. Even a day out on the bike or skiing tracking on GPS (Sports Tracker, before Strava!) and would have plenty of juice left. Still using it as my work phone.

Had a Samsung Galaxy S2, battery was just being constantly hammered, more so with each Android upgrade. At best I’d get a day out of a charge. Even with most things turned off, and no Bluetooth, GPS, Facebook (uninstalled as it chomped battery and data). Only background app was email. After a couple of years the battery was likely knackered also and was lasting half a day. Less if actually used it for calls.

On a Lumia 640 now (Win Phone, Microsoft branded but basically made by the remains of Nokia that MS took over), and battery life is around 2 to 3 days. That’s with reasonable bit of daily browsing, background email syncing on 4 mailboxes, reading email, Facebook app, WhatsApp, numerous background syncing on other apps (Cortana, news, weather, some other social apps). All the kind of stuff I had to disable on Android to manage to struggle through a day, no worries on this phone. That’s from new though.

Got a Note 4 and the battery is rubbish.

However, also got a CAT S50 and after a full day of Strava at BPW was still on 70% – mates iPhone was dead

iphone4 had its original battery changed out after 18 months as it wouldnt last 4 hours by then.

fitted an ebay special and its worked for another 3 years and still lasts a day during the week or all weekend if im not wasting time on it …..

New battery fitted. Cheap enough and as I was replacing the back cover anyway….

Had a bit of a funny result though as the camera refused to focus. Digging around on a Sony forum I came across advice to delete the data associated with the Camera App. That fixed it.

Maybe one of these:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/04/acer-liquid-zest-plus-best-android-battery/

WRT Battery life – keeping it between 40-80% as much as you can, and in cooler places, will both extend the useful life of the battery.