There are probably only a handful of cellphones available with hot swappable batteries. The Palm Centro isn’t one of them. Granted, this cute smartphone has a user-replaceable battery, something the iPhone lacks. (It also has copy and paste which the iPhone sorely lacks, but that is another story).

The Centro’s ancestor, the Treo 680 definitely doesn’t have a hot swappable battery. Every time you pull out the battery it does a soft reset - a reboot which takes about a minute. In fact, that is the only way to do a soft reset. Now on my Treo 680 this doesn’t bother me, because it is the designated replacement for my electronic brain, a Tungsten C. It just so happens that since it is unlocked I occasionally put in a SIM card so I can make calls.

A hot swappable battery is more of a requirement for a business notebook, or an older PDA which relies on AA batteries. With the Sony Clie PEG-S300 you had fifteen seconds to change the battery before the data was lost.

Posted on September 30th, 2008 by mervyn