The Sealed Battery showstopper: Heroes and Villians

I've commented before at length (and quoted below) on the pros and cons of having sealed batteries in our smartphones, i.e. batteries which can only be removed or changed at your manufacturer's designated service centre. My stated bullet points are all very well, but I've now had direct experience in the last month that strongly leads me to declare having a sealed battery as a showstopper, for me personally, at least. Below is my tale of woe and a handy table of which smartphones are vulnerable to potential disaster in this way.One upon a time, all smartphones came with a battery that you could take out. Often to reset the phone if all went horribly wrong, sometimes because you have a second, charged battery ready to go on a long day out, most of all to perhaps replace the original after a year or so when it wasn't delivering enough charge anymore. All good reasons (and expanded and tabulated below), but then the world changed in 2007 with Apple's introduction of the first iPhone.
Coming in a sealed 'Apple knows best, only Apple is trusted to open this thing up' package, the iPhone created a growing tide of 'imitators' (some caught out in the courts, mainly for copying other iPhone aspects, as you'll know from the news), all of which tried to go down the same route..I'd say that the popularity [among manufacturers] of user-replaceable and sealed batteries are running at roughly 50:50 - so one particular way of doing things certainly hasn't won out... The split neatly reflects the balance of pros and cons for each design system when it comes to batteries:All important pros and cons, and you'll weight them yourself, according to your own preferences. But there's a possible elephant in the room here, for normal phone users at least. Us gadgeteers and power users will be swapping smartphones at least once or twice a year, either through contract upgrades or, more likely, by just buying a new phone, selling the old one and slotting our SIM in as needed.
But more average phone users may well be locked into a 18 month or 24 month contract, or they may simply not have the finances to keep buying/upgrading. And there's every chance that the sealed battery in their smartphone may well be down to 50% or 60% of original capacity after 18 months.At which point it's appropriate to share a few tales of my own from just the last 12 months. Bear in mind that I've got 20 years of experience in the PDA and smartphone world and that I've been through (at last count) 164 different main phones/organisers in that time (including a fair number of review devices, obviously), so I'm speaking as the voice of someone who's 'been there done that', etc.