Battery in my elderly iPhone 4S is in palliative care.

Where’s the best place to get a replacement?

Amazon and eBay are full of them but the reviews are very very mixed with tales of fake batteries, fake capacities, old batteries sold as new, etc etc etc

Can anyone recommend a replacement battery that won’t burst into flames or give my dog a dose of cat-aids?

wasnotwas (or something like that) from here did mine for me for not a lot of cash.

The apple store will do it for around £50. I did mine myself and snapped the battery connector off the board (easily done apparently). Cost me £80 to get a non-apple repairer to fix it and it took 5 weeks. I’d recommend getting it done at the apple store. However you may be lucky.

Timpsons the shoe repair people.
Just got the power button repaired on my 4s, cost £29.99 and as a bonus the screen cable snapped when they opened it so they gave me a new screen for free 🙂
All their work comes with a 12 month warranty too.

The apple store will do it for around £50.

Their website says £59 plus £8 shipping!

That seems a lot for a £9 part and five minutes work.

I’ve looked at the ifixit guide and it really isn’t very hard to do.

The hard part seems to be getting “genuine” batteries!

My local phone shop, http://talkingmobilesdirect.com/

Been using them since when Ericsson made cool phones.

Got a new battery from an Ebay store + the tools required for around £25 took me about 10 minutes to complete.
I am not the most paitent of people and thought with all the tiny componants I would get frustrated quickly but surprising me and the missus it went okay. Just make sure you are on a surface where it is easy to find tiny parts if they flick out when taking the back off, although nothing did when I did the task.

I bought from Amazon for my 4S with the tool kit. Getting back off is the easy part, then a few really tiny screws, definitely possible to damage connecter.

This is what I bought for £9;

m-Digita® Replacement Battery For iPhone 4S -(tools included)

EDIT: I took my phone in to Apple and they did a test showing battery was pretty much done, they wanted £50 to do the replacement which I decided was too much for such an old phone

I just bought a cheap one off Ebay with a kit for doing it. Think it was £7 posted.

It’s really not hard. I’m hardly Swiss watch engineering specialist, and I managed it, you would have to be pretty (very) ham fisted to break something.

Battery has been good again for the last 6 months, easily lasts 24hrs now, where the last one would be flat in about 6.

That’s the thing, you can get kits like this one on Amazon for less than £6 than include the battery, tools and delivery.

But the reviews are really mixed – that one has 39 five star reviews saying it is great, but 22 one star reviews saying it’s crap!

The one star reviews point out the battery isn’t new and say it dies within a few weeks.

Got a new battery from an Ebay store + the tools required for around £25 took me about 10 minutes to complete.

Mine was under a tenner, higher capacity than the original and still going strong a year later. Wasn’t hard either. For that what have you got to lose really?

OP, well provided you don’t break your phone even if it doesn’t work you’ve spend £8. From what I understand you can send it back and get another.

brassneck: where did you find a higher capacity one? I’ve been looking for them but most of them seem to be scams or actually only have something like 10mAh extra!

jambalaya: that m-Digita one has pretty mixed reviews too. Some folk saying it comes with the wrong plug on it, was actually only 900mAh, reset their phone, or turns off at 50%!

Well it worked for me, phone has gone from 4 hours life to 24+. I think the variability in quality is genuine, so if you get a bad one send it back

I got told that you have as much chance getting a dodgy battery if you spend £25 as if you spend £5. so you may as well spend £5 and send it back if its crap.

Sounds like a lot of places are flogging reconditioned second-hand batteries that look okay but aren’t much better than the one they are replacing. 🙁

i went with the one that had the least bad reviews.

there will always be someone with something bad to say about a popular product.

i just avoided ones that said “phone burst into flames”

mines been in my iphone 4 for 2 years now….

you would have to be pretty (very) ham fisted to break something.

Hi.

This is why I am suspicious of the gold “high capacity” replacement batteries:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h67ighvmGg[/video]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs7yi1W4Qx8[/video]

Can I jump on this and ask about replacement I pad batteries as ours is about shot?

What jambo said, as there is no such thing as genuine apple oem parts. Spending £50 at the apple store is the only way to be sure. Other than that a £5 battery is a £15 is a £25et.. You dont get what you pay for, you get a fivers worth.

Same goes for ipad.

Just pick one under a tenner thats sold 1000s

Other than that a £5 battery is a £15 is a £25et

f

How do you know your £25 battery is actually any better than the £5 one? All of my non-genuine replacement batteries have turned out to be a bad idea over the years – whether an old iPod, IBM Thinkpad battery, Makita 18V batteries. All of them failed much much quicker than the batteries they replaced

I’ve just bought another couple of eBay Makita 10.8v batteries and don’t have much faith in them. Two different suppliers and prices but both are flaky already.

Thats what im saying, theyre not, a £25 battery is a £5 battery with a £20 higher price tag.

But you can have 10 for the price of one apple one. And theyre not that bad.

Im guessing the OP has a million and one “notifications” turned on?

I guess that in theory a genuine new battery is less likely to be very cheap.
This video is obviously a vested interest but shows the cheap ones are actually used batteries with high cycle counts:

[video]http://youtu.be/qOOZZeTTR1o[/video]

Im guessing the OP has a million and one “notifications” turned on?

Not particularly, no. I keep everything pretty minimal (for my own sanity as much as anything).

It’s just and old battery. It’s done a good few years of daily use but it isn’t holding a charge like it used to and will drop huge chunks in one go (eg drop from 20% to power off just by sending a text) so it is time for a new one.

Buy two of the five quid ones, use them both normally in the phone, send the one that seems worst back (more likely you’ll just be refunded. )

It’s 3 min job to swap. Just don’t lose the antenna ground that’s under the battery clip

Interesting app that. I’ve dled it. Got a couple of 4s at home I’ll swap batteries out and see if the stats change.

Is it really that easy to change the battery in a 4? Must be harder in the 5 – Apple store managed to break my screen (so gave me a new one but took another hour) changing out my 5 battery.

Yeah the 4/4S battery is pretty easy to change:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+4S+Battery+Replacement/7111

The 5 is a bit more involved, mostly because it is harder to get apart (you go in from the front) and it is more tightly packed:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+5+Battery+Replacement/10587